The Arabic word Rum is cognate with the English word “Rome” and is usually translated as such, although on modern maps the city of Rome will generally be written as Ruma. The word appears in the Koran and in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, typically rendered in English as “Rome.” These instances include prophecies of battles against “Roman” armies in Asia Minor and (most famously) Dabiq, the Syrian agricultural hamlet that inspired the name of ISIS’s magazine:

The Last Hour would not come until the Romans would land at Al-A’maq [a valley northwest of the Syrian city of Aleppo] or in Dabiq. An army consisting of the best soldiers of all the Earth at that time will come from Medina to counteract them. [Sahih Muslim 2897]

The Islamic State constantly harps on this series of battles. Only once they have occurred will the Antichrist appear, and only after his appearance can the world be rocked by tribulation and saved by the descended Jesus of Nazareth. For the true believers of ISIS, these stories provide an imaginative backdrop to hyperdramatize what is otherwise just another awful Middle Eastern war.

One of the most-quoted statements by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the spokesman of the Islamic State, cited another hadith:

We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market. On the authority of ‘Abdullah Ibn ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As, who said, “We were with [Muhammad] writing down what he was saying, when he was asked, ‘Which of the two cities will be conquered first? Constantinople or Rome?’ So Muhammad said, ‘The city of Heraclius will be the first to be conquered.’” Meaning the city of Constantinople. It was reported by al-Hakim in “Al-Mustadrak” according to the conditions of the two sheikhs (Bukhari and Muslim) and declared authentic by Imam adh-Dhahabi.

Islamic State propaganda at times encourages a straightforward, Trumpian reading of the word “Rome.” Last year, the Islamic State’s Tripoli province explicitly menaced the city of Rome. In a video depicting the simultaneous beheading of 21 Coptic Christians, the camera lingers over the image of Christian blood mixing with the tides of the Mediterranean. Soon after, ISIS supporters on social media began using the hashtag #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome (until Italians hijacked the tag and clogged it with travel advice and assorted ridicule). A film made by ISIS’s Nineveh propaganda bureau in December depicted an Islamic State-flagged tank crossing a desert to capture the Colosseum. In the distance is the Vittoriano.

There is a Scalia-like originalism in some forms of scriptural interpretation: Find out what “Rome” meant at the time of God’s revelation of the Koran to Muhammad, and you’ll know its One True Meaning. (The analogy to U.S. legal traditions is imperfect, but it’ll do.) Islam has its Breyers and Ginsburgs as well, and they ask the obvious questions: Do these prophecies mentioning “Rome” really refer to the “Rome” known to an illiterate seventh-century Arab merchant? Or are the prophecies “living” documents that require constant reinterpretation?