In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire by Tom Holland (PDF)

Description

A thrillingly panoramic and incredibly timely account of the rise of Islam, from the acclaimed author of Rubicon and Persian Fire. The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. In this exciting and sweeping history—the third in his trilogy of books on the ancient world—Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization aspects of which endure to the present day. With profound bearing on the most consequential events of our time, Holland ties the exciting story of Islam’s ascent to the crises and controversies of the present.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Praise for Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword“Elegantly written. . . . A veritable tour de force.”—The Wall Street Journal“A brilliant tour de force of revisionist scholarship and thrilling storytelling with a bloodspattered cast of swashbuckling tyrants, nymphomaniacal empresses and visionary prophets. The book is unputdownable. . . . An important work based on respected scholarship. It takes courage and intellect to confront such complexity and sensitivity. Written with flamboyant elegance and energetic intensity.” —The Times (London) “Accessible but delightful . . . as fun to read as any thriller, and with far richer intellectual nutritional content. . . . Those unwilling to struggle through academic texts have long needed a guide to the story of Islam as it’s understood by those with the fullest access to the latest linguistic and archaeological evidence. Now at last in Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword, they finally have it. . . . Holland—author previously of Rubicon and Persian Fire—is about as exciting a stylist as we have writing history today.”—The Daily Beast “[Holland’s] prose is shot through with wit and empathy. The result is a portrait of a lost world that is complex, contradictory and populated by people in thrall to ideas future generations would dismiss as ridiculous. Much like our own, in other words.”—Dallas Morning News“[An] elegant study of the roiling era of internecine religious rivalry and epic strife that saw the nation of Islam rise and conquer. . . . Holland confronts questions in the Quranic text head-on, providing a substantive, fluid exegesis on the original documents. Smoothly composed history and fine scholarship.” —Kirkus Reviews“Tom Holland is a writer of clarity and expertise, who talks us through this unfamiliar and crowded territory with energy and some dry wit. . . . The emergence of Islam is a notoriously risky subject, so a confident historian who is able to explain where this great religion came from without illusion or dissimulation has us greatly in his debt.” —The Spectator (London)“This is a book of extraordinary richness. I found myself amused, diverted and enchanted by turn. For Tom Holland has an enviable gift for summoning up the colour, the individuals and animation of the past, without sacrificing factual integrity. He writes with a contagious conviction that history is not only a fascinating tale in itself but is a well-honed instrument with which we can understand our neighbours and our own times, maybe even ourselves. He is also a divertingly inventive writer with a wicked wit—there’s something of both Gibbon and Tom Wolfe in his writing. In the Shadow of the Sword remains a spell-bindingly brilliant multiple portrait of the triumph of monotheism in the ancient world.” —The Independent (London)“This is a handsome volume, tackling an important question from a novel perspective.”—Sunday Telegraph (London)“Holland tells a complex story, dotted with names and places leagues beyond the realm of popular recognition. Yet he makes it unmistakably his own. He is one of the most distinctive prose stylists writing history today, and he drags his tale by the ears, conjuring the half-vanished past with such gusto that characters and places fairly bound from the page. In the Shadow of the Sword may reach provocative conclusions, but it is also a work of impressive sensitivity and scholarship.” —Telegraph (London)“An exhilarating read because Holland succeeds in capturing much of the excitement, strangeness and importance of a long past age. It is difficult not to be bedazzled.” —Financial Times (London)“An ambitious and important book. . . . His excellent book will be lauded, as it should be for doing what the best sort of books can do—examining holy cows.” —The Observer (London) About the Author Tom Holland is a historian of the ancient world and a translator. His books include Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, Persian Fire, In the Shadow of the Sword and The Forge of Christendom. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilization of Ancient Greece and Rome.” He lives in London with his family. Visit the author’s website at www.tom-holland.org. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Known UnknownsBetween Two WorldsYusuf As’ar Yath’ar, an Arab king celebrated for his long hair, his piety and his utter ruthlessness, had been brought to defeat. Leaving the reek of the battlefield, he rode his blood-flecked white charger down to the very edge of the Red Sea. Behind him, he knew, Christian outliers would already be advancing against his palace–to seize his treasury, to capture his queen. Certainly, his conquerors had no cause to show him mercy. Few were more notorious among the Christians than Yusuf. Two years previously, looking to secure the south-west of Arabia for his own faith, he had captured their regional stronghold of Najran. What had happened next was a matter of shock and horror to Christians far beyond the limits of Himyar, the kingdom on the Red Sea that Yusuf had ruled, on and off, for just under a decade. The local church, with the bishop and a great multitude of his followers locked inside, had been put to the torch. A group of virgins, hurrying to join them, had hurled themselves on to the flames, crying defiantly as they did so how sweet it was to breathe in “the scent of burning priests!”1 Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.Martyrdoms such as these, feted though they were by the Church, could not readily be forgiven. A great army, crossing from the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, had duly landed in Himyar. The defenders had been cornered, engaged and routed. Now, with the shallows of the Red Sea lapping at his horse’s hooves, Yusuf had come to the end of the road. Not all his obedience to the laws granted to God’s chosen prophet had been sufficient to save him from ruin. Slowly, he urged his horse forwards, breasting the water, until at last, weighed down by his armour, he disappeared beneath the waves. So perished Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.The collapse of the kingdom of the Himyarites in ad 525 is not, it is fair to say, one of the more celebrated episodes of ancient history. Himyar itself, despite having prospered for some six centuries until its final overthrow under Yusuf, lacks the ready brand recognition today of a Babylon, or an Athens, or a Rome. Unsurprisingly so, perhaps: for southern Arabia, then as now, was firmly peripheral to the major centres of civilisation. Even the Arabs themselves, whom the peoples of more settled lands tended to dismiss as notorious brutes–“of all the nations of the earth, the most despised and insignificant”3–might look askance at the presumed barbarities of the region. The Himyarites, so one Arab poet reported in shocked tones, left their women uncircumcised, “and do not think it disgusting to eat locusts.”4 Behaviour that clearly branded them as beyond the pale.Yet, it is not only in terms of its geography that Himyar seems to lie in shadow. Similarly obscure is the period in which the death of Yusuf occurred. The sixth century ad defies precise categorisation. It seems to stand between two ages. If it looks back to the world of classical civilisation, then so also does it look forward to the world of the Crusades. Historians categorise it, and the centuries either side of it, as “late antiquity”: a phrase that conveys a sense of lengthening shadows, and the Middle Ages soon to come.For anyone accustomed to thinking of history as a succession of neatly defined and self-enclosed epochs, there is something vaguely unsettling about this. Rather like the scientist in the classic horror film The Fly, who ends up a mutant combination of human and insect, the world of late antiquity can seem, from our own perspective, peculiarly hybrid. Far beyond the borders of Yusuf’s Himyarite kingdom, empires raised on fabulously ancient foundations still dominated the Near East and the Mediterranean, as they had done for centuries. Yet, their very age served only to highlight how profoundly they were coming to slip the moorings of their past. Take, for instance, the region immediately to the north of Arabia: the land we know today as Iraq. Here, across mudflats that had witnessed the dawn of urban civilisation, loyalty was owed to a king who was, just as his predecessor had been a whole millennium previously, a Persian. His dominions, like those of the Persian Empire that had existed a thousand years before, stretched eastwards to the frontiers of India, and deep into Central Asia. The splendours of the court over which he presided, the magnificence of its rituals, and the immodesty of his pretensions: all would have been perfectly familiar to a king of Babylon. That this was so, however, had been almost forgotten by the people of Iraq themselves. A spreading amnesia was blotting out memories that had endured for millennia. Even the Persians, far from venerating the truth about their glorious imperial heritage, had begun to obscure and distort it. The legacy of Iraq’s incomparable history lived on–preserved in the Persians’ fantasies of global rule and in the many glories that lent such fantasies credence–but increasingly it wore the look, not of ages departed, but of something new.Other superpowers were less neglectful of their pasts. The great cities of the Mediterranean, built of stone and marble rather than the mud-bricks favoured by the people of Iraq, were less prone to crumbling into dust. The empire that ruled them likewise wore, in 525, a veneer of venerable indestructibility. Even to the Persians, Roman might appeared something primordial. “God so arranged things,” they would occasionally acknowledge, albeit through gritted teeth, “that the whole world was lit up from the beginning by two eyes: namely, by the wise rulers of the Persian realm, and by the powerful empire of the Romans.”5 Nevertheless, the Romans themselves, although certainly never averse to flattery, knew better. Rather than believing that their empire had existed since the dawn of time, they knew perfectly well that all its greatness had evolved from nothing. To trace the course of that evolution might therefore be to fathom the secrets of its success. Even as Yusuf was vanishing into the Red Sea, plans were being laid in the Roman capital for an immense ransacking of libraries and archives, an unprecedented labour of scholarship whose goal was the preservation for all eternity of the empire’s vast inheritance of laws. This was no arid, merely antiquarian project. History, no less than armies or gold, had come to function as one of the sinews of the Roman state. It offered the empire reassurance that it was precisely what it claimed to be: the model of human order. How, then, was the prestige of Caesar to be maintained, if not by a perpetual trumpeting of Rome’s triumphant antiquity?The challenge for Roman policy-makers, of course, was that the glories of the past did not necessarily provide them with a reliable guide for the future. Indisputably, the empire remained what it had been for almost a millennium: the most formidable superpower of all. Wealthier and more populous than its great Persian rival, its hold over the eastern Mediterranean, always the richer half, appeared secure. From the mountains of the Balkans to the deserts of Egypt, Caesar ruled them all. Nevertheless, it was clearly an embarrassment, to put it mildly, that what had once been the western half of Rome’s empire had ceased, by 525, to be Roman at all. Over the course of the previous century, an immense swath of her holdings, like a sandcastle battered by the waves of an incoming tide, had crumbled utterly away. Britain had been lost as early as 410. Other provinces, over the succeeding decades, had followed. By the end of the century, the entire western half of the empire, even Italy, even Rome itself, had gone. In place of the venerable imperial order there was now a patchwork of independent kingdoms, all of them–with the exception of a few in western Britain–ruled by warrior elites from beyond the limits of the former empire. The relationship that existed between the natives and these “barbarian” newcomers varied from realm to realm: some, like the Britons, fought the invaders tooth and nail; others, like the Italians, were given to hailing them as though they were Caesars. Yet, in every case, the empire’s collapse resulted in the forging of new identities, new values, new presumptions. These, over the long term, would lead to the establishment of a radically new political order in western Europe. Rome’s abandoned provinces would never again acknowledge a single master.Time would see both the great empires of the age–the Persian as well as the Roman–go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. Not so the states established in Rome’s western provinces, some of which still commemorate in their modern names the intrusions back in late antiquity of barbarian war bands. Small wonder, then, that European historians have traditionally seen the arrival of the Franks in the land that would eventually become France, and of the Angles in the future England, as events of far greater long-term significance than the activities of any Caesar or Persian king. We know now, as their contemporaries did not, that ruin was stalking both the rival empires. A century on from the collapse of the Himyarite kingdom, and the two superpowers were staring into the abyss. That the Persian Empire would end up toppled completely while that of the Romans was left as little more than a mangled trunk, has traditionally served to mark them as dead-ends, bed-blockers, dinosaurs. How tempting it is to presume, then, that they must have perished of decrepitude and old age. The lateness of late antiquity, to those who trace in it only a calamitous arc of decline and fall, has the quality of dinner guests who refuse to get their coats once the party is over.Except that the empires raised by the peoples of the age were not solely of this earth. Radiant though a Caesar might appear to his subjects, awesomely though his palaces and citadels might tower above the common run, and remorselessly though his array of soldiers, and bureaucrats, and tax-collectors might serve his will, yet even he was merely a mortal, in a cosmos governed by a celestial king. There was only one universal monarch–and that was God. This presumption, by the time that Yusuf was brought to bay early in the sixth century ad, was one virtually unchallenged across the entire sweep of the Near East–and it affected almost every aspect of geopolitics in the region. When Yusuf clashed with the Ethiopian invaders, far more was at stake than the petty ambitions of squabbling warlords. The interests of heaven as well had been intimately involved. Between those fighting in the Jewish cause and those in the name of Christ, the differences were so profound as to be irreconcilable. Confident though both sides were that the god they worshipped was the only god–monos theos in Greek–this shared conviction only rendered them all the more implacably opposed. Not just in southern Arabia, but across the entire span of the civilised world, devotion to a particular understanding of the divine had become an emotion that defined the lives of millions upon millions of people. In an age when realms might crest and fall like the spume of a wave, and even great empires totter, there was certainly no earthly power that could command such allegiance. Identity was coming to be defined, not by the kingdoms of this world, but by various conceptions of the One, the Only God: by “monotheisms.”This development signalled a transformation of human society with incalculable consequences for the future. Of all the various features of the modern world that can be traced back to antiquity–alphabets, democracy, gladiator films–none, perhaps, has been more globally influential than the establishment, for the first time in history, of various brands of monotheism as state religions. At the start of the third millennium since the birth of Christ, some three and a half billion people–over half the population of the world–identify themselves with one or other of the various religions that assumed something approaching their modern form in the 250 years either side of Yusuf’s death. The period of late antiquity, then, unfamiliar though it may be in comparison to other epochs of history, is no less pregnant with relevance for that. Wherever men or women are inspired by a belief in a single god to think or to behave in a certain way, they demonstrate its abiding influence. The impact of the revolution that it witnessed still reverberates today.It is the ambition of this book to trace the origins and the progress of that same revolution. How was it that the patterns of people’s thought, over the course of only a few centuries, came to be altered so radically and so enduringly? The story is a richly human one, replete with vivid drama, extraordinary characters and often riotous colour. Yet, it is also one that imposes peculiar demands upon the historian: for much of it takes place in a dimension beyond the physical. It features kings, but also angels; warlords, but also demons. Consequently, not every event in the pages that follow can be explained purely in terms of material self-interest or political calculation. Shadowing the often brutally vivid world of mortal affairs is a dimension that is heaven-lit and damnation-haunted. Certainly, when Yusuf’s contemporaries analysed his downfall, they were not naïve in their analysis. They recognised that complex issues of trade policy and the rivalries of the two distant superpowers had been lurking in the background. Yet they never doubted that the sands of Arabia had become the stage for an authentically celestial drama. The forces of heaven and hell had met and clashed. It was a matter of opinion whether Yusuf was on the side of the angels or the demons; but neither Jews nor Christians had any doubt that what had happened had derived ultimately from God. This was the core presumption of the age; and a history of late antiquity that neglects to pay due acknowledgement to it is a history that has failed.The beliefs of the period must therefore be treated with both seriousness and empathy. Yet this does not mean that their claims should be taken wholly at face value. Back in the early fourth century, a Palestinian bishop by the name of Eusebius wrote a history of the early Church. In it, he initiated a tradition of historical enquiry that explained the past as the tracing of patterns upon time by the forefinger of God. This presumption, although stupendously influential, and not merely among Christian authors, fell out of fashion in the West several centuries ago. Whatever their personal religious convictions may be, modern historians do not generally explain past events as the workings of divine providence. All aspects of human society–even beliefs themselves–are now presumed to be products of evolution. Nor is this a uniquely modern perspective. Eusebius himself, fifteen hundred years before Darwin, had recognised in it a pernicious and peculiarly threatening heresy. Nothing was more alarming to him than the notion propagated by the enemies of his faith that it was something upstart and contingent, a mere distorted echo of more venerable traditions. His history, far from tracing changes in the doctrines and institutions of the Church, aimed to demonstrate that they had never changed in the slightest. And Christianity itself? Christianity, Eusebius presumed, had existed since the dawn of time: “For, obviously, we must regard the religion proclaimed in recent years to every nation through Christ’s teaching as none other than the first, the most ancient, and the most primitive of religions.”61 From a letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham, discovered and quoted by Shahid (1971), p. 47.2 Ibid., p. 57.3 Chronicon ad Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens: 1.237.4 From a poem written in the Hijaz, the region of Arabia where Mecca is situated: quoted by Hoyland (2001), p. 69.5 Theophylact Simocatta: 4.2.2.6 Eusebius: History of the Church, 1.4.10. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In the Shadow of the Sword falls lightly into the genre of “popular histories”, with all the pluses and minuses implied by that. I would start off by allowing that it is an enjoyable read, though some, those who share all of the author’s biases, will find it more completely enjoyable than those who do not. Like all “histories” written for a general audience, it is written in an engaging style, and is a quick read. While written in a style that compels one to keep reading page after page, the prose does border on the purple variety at times. Not quite purple, not quite not. He tends to over egg the pudding in his descriptions, perhaps that is how it would be best described, a style which would not be out of place on reality tv. There is nothing here either in the style or the content which would tax the capabilities of the average 16 year old. Exciting, quite exciting and riveting, perhaps a bit overly so for a history, though that is a matter of taste. Though enjoyable as a cream pie, it is fair to say that his constant desire for the juicy depiction of events falls somewhat short of the reality which existed at the time. But, it was truly an engaging read, one I was glad to have undertaken, and one through which I learned a few things. For that reason alone I do not hesitate to recommend it, but with a few provisos, which may or may not be important to everyone.The problems with the book, as a history, are several. The worst of which, is a defect which is not viewed kindly by actual historians, though might well add to its appeal to the general audience at which this book is squarely aimed. It is anachronistic, in every sense of the word, and is very much of the Whig school of historical interpretation. The author is plainly and unabashedly of the mindset that the human race has progressed upward from the not-quite-so-advanced-and-bright assemblage of people and faith traditions which are the subject of this work. The book positively drips with condescension towards the beliefs of the Persians, Arabs, Jews, Christians, and Romans who are brought to life here. He does not label them as stupid and backward in so many words, but the descriptions make it impossible for someone who knows nothing of the history to come to any other conclusion. It is fair to say that they are, by and large, subtly and not so subtly, mocked, page after page, for their beliefs. “There but for the Grace of (the non-existent) God, go (the enlightened secular) I” is the constant undercurrent here. So, that is one anachronism, judging the past by using the idols of our present age as the standard. The other anachronisms are the use of present day artifacts to describe historical realities, which cannot honestly be described that way. The author describes events in 300 A.D. as being “globalization”. The Catholic Church was “the first NGO”, which was a “welfare state”, and created “safety nets for the poor”. The reason that language would never have been used contemporaneously is that it is in no way an accurate description of how the actors then would have conceived of them, as realities. This may be poor history, but it does make for more engaging reading.The book is excellent as a straight dates and sequences log, and will help most people understand what happened when and where. It is on fairly solid ground there, revealing much that most readers will be unaware of. For that, and that alone, it is well worth reading for someone looking for an introduction to the period in question. The main defect in the book is that it is highly inaccurate when the author attempts to describe the motivations of the peoples in question, a task for which he is obviously intellectually unprepared. Since this book in large part deals with the history of the Jews and Judaism, the early history of Christianity and Christians, and the beginnings of Islam, it is, perforce, to a large extent a history of faiths and their intersections and conflicts. The author spends a great deal of the book explaining the religious motivations of these various peoples. The problem is that the author, has little or no knowledge of the theologies involved. It would take someone who was a lifelong student of the history of the theological developments of these various faiths to be able to describe what motivated these various peoples.The author is not that person, yet he never hesitates to pretend that he knows things he does not know. This is the biggest reservation which I have about this book. If you are of the opinion that Bill Maher actually knows something about religious faiths, you are not likely to recognize the soft bigotry in this book and the cringe inducing suppositions about motivations on display here. If you have some of the necessary background in theology, I would not let this put you off, as it is an interesting book, just be forewarned.Some of these problems are due to the author’s lack of background in these particular areas, and some of them are due to the fact that he is none too careful about his sources, all of which, whether it by Livy or Jack the cobbler’s uncle are given equal pride of intellectual place in the telling. The thoughts he puts into the heads of the generic person of that era, whether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim are often complete rubbish, which can, if I am being generous, be put down to his carelessness with sources, wherein the ideas of the outlier are allowed to represent the thinking of the mainstream theologically literate person of that time period as a whole. That does allow him to spin a much more interesting yarn here, full of all kind of anecdotes, but, again, just be careful at dissecting this. Just to show that I am not making this up to be flip, though anyone who reads this book will find scores of examples, I reference here one, but there are scores. On page 334 after two pages of references to some of the dubious sources noted above, all of which are prefaced by his phrasing that “if this had happened” or “if so and so perceived it this way”, a veritable cascade of “ifs”, he says, in reference to one of the biggest reveals of that particular chapter—“All this is speculation.” Well, and so it is, as is much of the book.This is an engaging book of popular history, not necessarily a fully accurate one. You will probably come away knowing more about the period than you did, but, as far as understanding it, or understanding the motivations of the people who made this history, you are likely to know no more than the author, which is almost nothing, though of the truth of his uneducated prejudices he is quite sure, as will be many of his readers, as other reviews make painfully clear.

⭐This was a fascinating book to read, about a topic I knew very little of.The downside is this book was very weighty, it wasn’t a quick read but took some time to get through.I still recommend it.

⭐I haven’t read the previous books by Tom Holland about the classical west

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⭐), of which apparently _In the Shadow of the Sword_ is the concluding volume. It is long winded ( some may say exquisitely detailed – I found it a bit overwritten), but ultimately Holland makes an interesting – if not tremendously controversial – point: as with the development and evolution of Christianity, so too did Islam evolve and change over time before finally asserting itself as a “religio” – a religion in its own right.The first 300 pages of the book have very little to do with Islam, as Holland discusses the tumultous world that was the Near East in the 4th – 6th centuries: the Roman empire in the west was crumbling, there were divisions within the Christian church, the Sassanid empire was facing a succession crisis, and disease – apparently Y. pestis (bubonic plague) – ravaged the cities. To contemporaries, it must have been apocalyptic. In this highly charged social, political and religious climate emerged Islam. That these factors influenced its metoric success is hardly news (for an excellent and readable history on this period, I recommend

⭐). Holland first argues that Islam (and the Muslim world) are strongly influenced by these classical precursors – that the Islamic empires of the Near East are very much part of the classical world and are, to a large extent, successor states. For example, in commenting on a 679 pilgrimage by the Frankish bishop Arculf, Holland writes, “the difference between (Frank and Arab) was one of quality, not kind. Saracens and Franks both lived like squatters amid the splendours of a vanquished greatness.” (369) This, too is not a new interpretation. (An outstanding discussion of the connections between classical Rome and Greece to the Islamic world is

⭐.) What is new – and, I imagine, volitile and (somewhat) revolutionary, is Holland’s textual criticism of the Qu’ran.”Textual criticism” is a way scholars attempt to discern the authorship, date and place of composition of ancient texts. Of course, to do this to the Qu’ran would be (to devout Muslims), anathema, the Qu’ran understood to be divinely revelaed in its entirety to the Prophet Mohammed. Yet there are a number of tantalizing and unresolved questions that Holland considers. For example, given the wide variety of Christian sects in the Near East at the time of Mohammed, who (or rather which group) was he referring to when Mohammed referred to “Christians”? (There are several very good books on the history of the early Church during this time; a few I recommend are

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⭐) Why did Muslims reorient the qibleh (originally facing east towards Jerusalem, later facing south towards Mecca) when there is no Qu’ranic evidence to support or explain this? Holland goes further, seriously questioning the isnads (the “pedigree”) of the hadith (the “sayings” attributed to Mohammed), essentially arguing that the more elaborate the isnad, the more likely it is to have been an utter fabrication.That faiths have long labored to deny and destroy any evidence that there were any other interpretations of their belief than that accepted as “orthodox” is a subdiscipline of history and literary criticism. As Holland writes, “Long before the coming of Islam, schoalrs labouring over other works of scripture had inadvertently demonstrated an unsettling truth: the greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.” (307) The final 140 pages of _In the Shadow of the Sword_, Holland attempts to show just how complete Islamic amnesia is towards the creation of the Qu’ran, with some startling inferences about where the original “city of the Prophet” was. (Holland claims it was not Mecca for a variety of reasons.)The sanitization of the Qu’ran, and the uniformity of Islam, Holland attempts to show, was only complete with the ascention of the ‘Abbysids as the ulema ascended to religious supremacy, recognized “by everyone, even the Caliph … (of) the ulema’s understanding that attributed almost every single thing of value … to the Prophet and the Prophet alone.” (431) Of course, in so doing, the ‘Abbysids imitated both the Sassanids and Romans before them who believed their position as rulers of the world was the result of favor by the gods.The claims and inferences Holland makes are fascinating and compelling. While I agree in broad terms with much of what he asserts here (especially regarding the evolution of Islam as a faith), the specific supporting details he provides are thin and based on conjecture. Holland attributes this to the lack of a tradition of literary inquiry (ala the Talmud), and he may be correct; still, there wasn’t enough of a “smoking gun” – or even of a perponderance of evidence for me to be convinced wholly of his argument. The argument is worth considering; it is disappointing, then, to have it so deeply buried in historical detail that ultimately is of only ancilary value.

⭐This book took Holland twice as long to write (6 years) than his usual work because he assumed there would be plenty of accessible evidence and documentation to digest and work through, but no, very little existed, so he was searching for ‘evidence’ that did not exist. In many ways similar to the Jesus story, nothing seemed to be written about Muhammad and Mecca while he was alive, it all came decades after. The late Dr Patricia Crone has similar issues when she did similar research. Does raise many questions as history certainly was being recorded at the time, but nothing about this monumental event we are told occurred. A great read, and only criticism is that it could have been a tad shorter, and I would say that if anyone has problems getting past the first 100 pages, then read the last 100 pages first, it is well worth it,.

⭐I got the sample on Kindle, which was mostly the very long introduction, and though I was put off by Holland’s pompous and extravagant style, it did grip me, because he seemed to be erecting the scaffolding for a careful and thorough exploration of the murky origins of Islam. “He does go on a bit,” I thought, “but never mind, this is interesting stuff.”But then the clouds of grandiloquence did not clear into any kind of lucid narrative, of the sort that thrilled in “Rubicon”. It seemed Holland had just fallen in love with his own voice, and couldn’t stop his compulsive, generalised fancifying of what people were thinking and feeling 1,600 years ago. Ornate and convoluted sentences notwithstanding, the tone was of cheap, florid historical fiction. He seemed to cluck with self-satisfaction at the sheer immensity of the paragraphs.I got a refund.

⭐The book consists of three parts, part one being a single chapter introducing the “purpose” of the rest of the work. I feel a bit like Holland real got into or really wanted to write the first & third parts but to make a book of it also had to include some other material. The opening sixty pages will prove facinating to most readers, as will the closing hundred-&-fifty or so. The material would intrigue alone, then it’s well structured, clearly presented and more than well written enoughHowever, the whole middle section – from page 60 to 300 – I found a bit of a slog. It’s just a mess really. A strange combination of things that are too broadly sweeping mixed randomly with overly detailed accounts of things that don’t go anywhere.The material itself is interesting enough and covers a neglected period but it just isn’t well told or made into a coherant structure. If it suits the story you’re telling you can jump around with the timeline but be clear about it and have a purposeThis is an incredably deeply researched scholarly work, the middle section is littered with references, and the depth of background undderstanding is testified to in the wealth of footnotes (I lose track with a Kindle but it looked like two or three endnotes a page through the middle part). Unfortunately that research hasn’t always translated into a tale worth telling. A lot I ploughed through like reading a chronicle. What was good was a joy to read; what wasn’t, wasn’t.I wanted to mention the scholarship particularly given a previous reviewer’s comments below. King attacks the one point where Holland really is unassailable. If you want a story, if you want a fun read then this probably isn’t the book for you. Yet you can’t complaint the author doesn’t know his material. He’s steeped in it. I guess King has his reasons for wanting to believe that – & wanting other people to believe it – just like I guess he has his reasons for that gratuitous swipe at the Hindoos. Though that can’t make it true. Holland knows the primary texts, I just wish he could have translated that into something better for the long middle section

⭐It’s good. It’s worth the read. Its something that needs to be talked about. I learned a lot about the history of the time prior to the Arab empire. A transition of rival clans to a people who coalesced into an empire.The received tradition of the origins of Islam being born in the full light of history is certainly false. The first histories about this vague figure called Mohammed were wrote between 200 – 300 years after the life of this figure, hence there is no certainty as to who he really was.There was some sort of Mohammed but the recieved tradition as to who he was is very much open to doubt. The koran only mentions the name Mohamed 4 times. Mohammed means the praised one. “This praised one” could even of been referring to Jesus, it’s hard to know. We cant be certain about the begging of Islam because its seems that the histories concerning Mohammed have been revised by later Arab scholars.Tom Holland in his English way describes what we know of the origins of islam from a historical academic point of view. His history and his conclusion may scare some people but if truth is what you want then be brave and read this book.Islam is about to experience what the Christian world did over 150 years ago, a total unrelenting sceptical criticism of its truth claim and its origin. If you are interested in either history generally or the origins of Islam specifically then Tom Holland’s book is a good place to start your journey.

⭐An excellent read, which attempts to describe in detail the regional history and prevailing culture at the time of Mohamed’s existence in the Arabian Peninsular. The book tries to assess the arrival of Islam asking the awkward question: did the Arab Empire create Islam or did Islam create the Arab Empire?For me, the one let down in this book is that Tom Holland is very selective about his choice of examples from history and is extremely erratic in his selections from history. This is confusing for the reader and even encourages one to believe that he is simply picking examples that support his various arguments – true or not. Tom Holland knows well that there are many people keen to pick holes in his beliefs and therefore he should be alot clearer and more honest in his presentation.That said, I recommend this book for a different view on an extremely interesting and influential part of history which still has consequences on our lives today.

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