Newest book from the author of "Persian Fire" and "Rubicon", both of which were bestwelling, exciting and relatively well written (though unoriginal) overviews of the Greco-Persian Wars and the end of the Roman Republic. Now he tackles the thorny subject (and Spenglerman's favorite) of the rise of Islam. Or rather, what preceded it and birthed it, what it was like during its early infancy and how it transitioned towards adulthood.
Caveat 1: Though I have not read this piece from Holland, I can guarantee two things. One, it will be horribly exciting, two, the narrative constructed will be frenetic yet clear, and three, its scholarly power and potential will be almost nonexistant. Holland is a consummate story teller, and he knows his way around cobbling and exegizing various sources, but his insights are neither particularly innovative nor historical.
Caveat 2: Holland does not have an iota of Arabic, or Syriac, or Aramaic, or Pahlavi (Middle Persian), or Armenian, or Hebrew, (or Coptic or Turkic) within him. He accessed those Near Eastern sources with the help of a Syriac and Arabic researcher(or researchers ?), while he used his knowledge of Latin and Greek (the former stronger than the latter) to round up the Byzantine and Western European sources. This is akin to someone writing a narrative of WW1 and 2 without knowing English while only knowing French and German and nothing else. It maybe helpful to have a couple of grains of salt at hand.
Radio Netherlands Intro:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/prophet-came-jordan
Reviews form UK papers:Islam is a mishmash of earlier religions. Muhammad was an Arab version of the Greek poet Homer. Islam didn’t arise in Mecca but in the Jordanian city of Petra. The Arab conquests came first, and only then the Muslims. In his new book The Fourth Beast, British historian Tom Holland makes some shocking claims. The Dutch version is out now, even before the English version has been published.
“Islam wasn’t a fresh start but an accumulation of elements from Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism,” says Tom Holland, who is in Amsterdam for the launch of his book this week.
Conquest came first
Another remarkable statement: Holland doesn’t believe that Arabs first converted to Islam before setting off to conquer other countries. “Horsemen with a Qur’an in one hand and a sword in the other – that’s not even possible,” he jokes. “Do you know how much weight you’d have to carry?”
No, only when the Arabs had gained power across a wide area did Islam gradually develop over a time span of around two centuries, Holland believes. His book describes not only the rise of Islam, but also the decay of the Roman and Persian empires in the Middle East.
Holland doesn’t dispute the fact that Muhammad did exist as a prophet, but he doesn’t see Islamic writings as the most reliable source to find out the truth about Muhammad.
“We supposedly know a lot about Muhammad, a lot more than about Jesus,” Holland says. “What he ate, whom he fell in love with, even that Muhammad liked cats – I find that the nicest characteristic, that Muhammad cut up his clothes so the cat could sit down. But the odd thing is that the further away from Muhammad’s birth date you get, the more extensive the biographies become.”
There is hardly any material from the time of Muhammad. “Everything dates from at least two centuries later,” Holland says. He likes to compare Muhammad with the Greek epic poet Homer.
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For Islam researchers, Holland’s claims will come as no surprise. “It says in the Qur’an itself that it’s a continuation of Judaism and Christianity,” says Petra Sijpesteijn, professor of Arabic language and culture at Leiden University. “Western researchers generally assume that the Qur’an wasn’t written all at once, and Muslim scholars also recognise that Islam developed over the course of the centuries.”
It’s obvious that during the Arab conquests local customs and rituals were adopted, says Sijpesteijn. “The new world view had to connect with the world of the people living in a region, or it wouldn’t have been accepted.”
Early sources
Sijpesteijn also points out that there are sources from the time of Muhammad or shortly afterwards, both Islamic and non-Islamic. She studies Arabic writings on ancient papyrus scrolls. “In the writings of 12 years after the death of Muhammad, Muslims are referred to as a separate religious group, first using the term muhajiroun, migrants who had left hearth and home with a purpose, or Saracens, descendents of Sarah and Abraham,” she says. “And from around 730AD, terms like Islam, Muslims and specific religious customs such as zakat (charity) were already being practiced and described.”
Sijpesteijn also disagrees with Holland about the place in which Islam arose. “Mecca is already described as a holy place in pre-Islamic manuscripts. So why wouldn’t it exist?” She does think that Arab Christians from more northerly regions played a major role in the further development and distribution of Islam.
In short, there is nothing particularly new in Holland’s book, though it’s “nice that he makes it accessible to ordinary people,” says Sijpesteijn. “But as soon as you talk about the origins of Islam, the discussion among both Muslims and non-Muslims becomes extremely sensitive.”
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http://www.bryanappleyard.com/the-truth-of-islam/
http://www.scotsman.com/news/interview- ... -1-2221063Holland’s book leaves almost no aspect of the traditional story of Islam intact“The degree of authority one can give to the evangelists about the life of Christ is relatively small,” he has written, “whereas for the life of Muhammad we know everything, more or less. We know where he lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the time.”Most western academics would now disagree with every word of this, and their scholarly scepticism is about to explode into the wider world with the publication of a book by the historian Tom Holland — In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World.
In essence, it is Holland’s view that Muhammad’s life and sayings were constructed long after his death in 632 (or, according to some scholars, 634) to support and explain the Koran. He embarked on the project five years ago with the usual assumption that the stories were literally true.
“When I began to write,” he says, “I had no real idea of the minefield I was stepping into. From various books about Muhammad I had assumed the sources were pretty solid and there must be contemporary sources for these stories. It was quite alarming when I discovered this wasn’t the case. I would keep going to the British Library and my jaw would drop at the implications of what I was reading.”He found that we seem to know next to nothing about the central sacred text of Islam. This holy text, not the prophet, is the core of Islam. It is what Christ is to Christianity. It is the message; Muhammad is only the messenger. Yet Fred Donner, one of America’s greatest Islamic scholars, rounded up his life’s work with a remarkable profession of ignorance.
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Modern scholars, he adds, have shown that even the most seemingly authentic hadiths reflect controversies that were raging 200 years after Muhammad’s time. “Over and over again, the prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival and often directly antagonistic traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs or the superstitions of infidel peoples.”
If the hadiths were fakes, Holland points out, then so were the isnads that had been deployed to buttress them, “. . . and if the isnads cannot be trusted, then how can we know for sure that the Koran dates from the time of Muhammad? How can we know who compiled it, from what sources and for what motives? Can we even be sure that its origins lie in Arabia? In short, do we really know anything at all about the birth of Islam?”
He finds a clue in the similarity between some hadiths and the Jewish Torah. Both prescribe stoning as the punishment for adulterers, yet the Koran suggests “100 lashes”.
Holland points out that Islam continued the Christian and Jewish tradition of faith in one god. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity — one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?”
Holland knows taking a historical scalpel to the body of faith causes pain, and he regrets that. “On the other hand, if you want to make sense of Islam and you are not a believer, you have no choice.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 00583.htmlHis latest book, In the Shadow of The Sword – subtitled “the Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World” – makes that point just as clearly. But in writing about the early history of Islam he ran slap up against a massive problem – and one that is the reason this book has taken him five years to write instead of the usual two. Whereas his previous books usually had a fair range of contemporary sources, for the rise of Islam and the early Arab conquests of the Middle East, there are hardly any.
“I had read Karen Armstrong, Barnaby Rogerson and these biographies of Mohammed, and I assumed that the sources for his life and for the early conquests were pretty solid. I thought that we would have the equivalent of a Cicero or a Caesar, contemporaries writing about it that would give us at least a rough sense of the narrative. And then to discover that the first mention of Mohammad in Arabic is almost 60 years after his death and that the first datable mention of his life isn’t until 200 years after his death, and that the first mention of Mecca outside the Koran isn’t until 100 years after his death – and that it is located in Iraq – it makes you think, well, this is odd.”
This lack of historical sources isn’t seen as a problem for Muslims, to whom the Koran is the very speech of God, unedited by human hand. No text could possibly be holier. To a Muslim, the Koran offers all the explanation anyone could possibly need of how a sophisticated religion could suddenly spring up, uncontaminated by all other religions, in a desert.
Yet Holland isn’t a believer. So rather than interpret the Koran as the revealed word of God, he sees it as a sophisticated ancient text which is plugged into currents and trends reaching back for centuries. To Holland, all the monotheistic religions – Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam – influence each other, even at when they start separating themselves out into codified religions.
Did he begin the book with this thesis in mind? “It was inchoately there. Having written Millennium, what struck me was how long it took the states of what became Christian Europe to get over the Roman Empire. It takes a long time for Roman Europe to become Christian medieval Europe. And I thought the same about this period. Can it really be the case that a switch gets flicked and then suddenly Persia and the Roman Near-East becomes Islamic? Civilizations don’t change like that. It must be a more gradual process.”
In the absence of contemporary sources on early Islam, Holland draws heavily on his knowledge of the empires eclipsed by its rise and of the Near East and of pre-Islamic society. The sixth century plagues that wiped out a third of the population of the Near East (but to which the nomads of the desert seemed immune), the Christian mystics in the Syrian desert, the rebellions that weakened the Persian empire, the decades-long wars waged by Constantinople, the spread of sects into Arabia – all have their part in this story.
Holland, who employed a Syriac and Arabic-speaking researcher but relied on his own Greek and Latin, emphasises that such a wide-ranging approach has its benefits. “All of the fields of study in this book are ones which take a lifetime of scholarship to really become an expert in – we’re talking Koranic scholarship, the history of early Islam, Roman, Persian and Talmudic studies. But when you look at them all together, you realise that the experts in various disciplines are hardly ever aware of what is going on in other, parallel, ones. Maybe it takes a fool to rush in where angels fear to tread …” He gives a sad laugh.
But given the paucity of contemporary sources on the rise of Islam, and also the fact that his own secular interpretation might offend Muslim sensibilities, didn’t he ever think about abandoning the project? “No. The meaning of Islamophobia is fear of Islam. The Islamophobic thing to do would be to say yes, I have looked at the construction of Christian Europe in those terms but I am not going to do the same for the construction of the Islamic Middle East.
“That, it seems to me, would be a dereliction of duty. It would be to assume that if you, as a non-Muslim, say something that would annoy a Muslim, that they are going to come and kill you. Which I don’t believe. I am putting my faith in the fact that Muslims will be realistic about this. I may be wrong.
“If you cede a whole area of history and say ‘That’s been closed off, we’re not going to look at it’ – particularly when that history is having a measurable impact on the world we live in …” He abandons the sentence with a shrug at the impossibility of the thought he has just expressed. “I think that’s what history is about, to a degree – working out where things that exist now came from and how they got here.”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/776597 ... slam.thtmlBut running like a stream of molten lava beneath the narrative of Holland's history is an even more intriguing story. This is a history of the history as it were, telling how the warrior-dominated Empires of Antiquity were transformed into the first monotheistic states; how the old inclusive conquest states, with their comparatively simple desire for submission and tribute were replaced by states which imposed systems of total belief and demanded exclusive loyalty. As Holland reveals this was a slow, incremental achievement by literate and inventive clerics, teachers and jurists. On the one hand they are heroes, proving to the world that the pen is mightier than the sword, building a world dominated by passionate beliefs, schools, hospices and hospitals (rather than theatres, fora and amphitheatres) but they are also the villains, the crabby, jealous, legalistic men who forge prisons from the bricks of religion. We observe the Eastern Roman Empire morphing itself into Byzantium, first with the closure of the last pagan temples and schools of philosophy, then with a slow tightening of the definitions of Christian Orthodoxy, which will progressively condemn Jews and Samaritans before advancing to exclude the so-called Arian, Monophysite or Nestorian churches. In the same period the Talmudic schools of Mesopotamia create modern Judaism and Sassanian Iran becomes the homeland of a national, priest-ridden Zoroastrian orthodoxy. Many of its rituals, the habit of five daily prayers, of an obsessive dental hygiene and intolerance of dissent (which led to the martyrdom of such a God-loving individual as the prophet Mani) will be grafted into early Islam. This is wonderful, hard-hitting analysis, elegantly tied into the unfolding narrative of events, with each religious establishment exposed in all its glory and treacherous realpolitik.
Holland has also set himself a third task, as judge of the traditional Muslim narrative. He explains that the traditional story of Islamic origins and the life of the Prophet was only written down a hundred years after the events occurred, and was edited by writers whose primary motivation was theological, and who needed to ground their own political and legal innovations by creating retrospective case history. This is true enough, and as he also demonstrates this happened all over the ancient world, but the craft of the historian is to surely sift and winnow, not to throw the baby out with the bath-water. But instead of interpreting the traditions, Holland follows the brilliant, challenging ideas that Patricia Crone threw into the goldfish bowl of Islamic scholarship a few decades ago to stir things. In essence the full deconstructionist interpretation of nascent Islam denies the existence of pre-Islamic Mecca, tries to divide the Prophet Muhammad into two characters (along the obvious fault line of the different tone of the revelations from Mecca and Medina) and imagines early Islam as a Jewish-Christian heresy aspiring to conquer the Holy Land. They also tend to site non-Muslim sources in preference to anything that can be seen to have been composed in Abbasid Baghdad. But interestingly enough, Holland's vivid selection of non-Muslim texts all prove broadly supportive of the traditional narrative of events – even the most remarkable chance find of them all, a humble receipt for sheep paid over to a very early Arab military detachment operating in Egypt.
Despite this, Holland keeps rigidly to the deconstructionist interpretation, indeed pushes out the boundaries with some rather wild suggestions, such as placing the original homeland of Islam in a base-camp on the desert borders of Palestine, not to mention the creation of Mecca by an Ummayyad Caliph. I was intrigued to read these suggestions, but ultimately unconvinced. Take the issue of Mecca as an example. We know that the ritual actions of the Meccan Haj are pagan in origin, and can usefully be compared to the survival of other pagan rituals in this period, such as at Harran. No-one interested in creating a brand new, pure Islamic cult centre in the middle of the Arabian desert would have instituted ritual actions connected with the annual commemoration of the death and rebirth of the great Goddess! And of course the geographical location of Mecca allows us to understand the many Ethiopian and Red Sea influences that have been discerned in the language of the Koran. Even with these slight flaws In the Shadow of the Sword remains a spell-bindingly brilliant multiple portrait of the triumph of monotheism in the ancient world.
Spectator Interview
In the Shadow of the Sword is a necessarily masculine, bloody history. The only woman to emerge from its pages with any verve is Theodora, the tightrope-walking trollop wife of Roman Emperor Justinian, later reformed into an alms-giving saint. ‘This is a very masculine world in which men do horrible things to each other, but Christianity does give a role to women that they had not had under paganism and Islam likewise is, I think, best thought of as a response to conditions of anarchy and horror that make recent events in Iraq look like a cakewalk. The horror of the Near East in the seventh century beggers description — it’s a place ravaged by plague, by war, by gangs, by factionalism and of course in such a world women are objects to be stolen and plundered and abused. A lot of the things about Islam which seem retrogressive to us now at the time must have been an absolute blessing to women. One of the reasons why it’s specified that a man can have more than one wife is precisely so women will have a protector. The requirements to keep themselves covered, which seems to us so sexist, actually in a world where a woman’s flesh is a commodity, is something incredibly precious. So I think that looking at it in that light you see, ethically and morally, just how much better the world is for these revolutions. And so it’s so tempting to buy into the notion that everything was great before these miserable Christians with their grey breath and these Muslims with their stern repellent warrior king came along, but I have absolutely no doubt that I’d rather be living in a monotheistic world than a premonotheistic world.’ In spite of everything, there are few who would dispute that.
