Edmond Dantès
Dantès the White
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Release date: Out now
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In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two great empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on, and one had vanished forever, while the other was a dismembered, bleeding trunk. In their place, a new superpower had arisen: the empire of the Arabs. So profound was this upheaval that it spelled, in effect, the end of the ancient world.
But the changes that marked the period were more than merely political or even cultural: there was also a transformation of human society with incalculable consequences for the future. Today, over half the world’s population subscribes to one of the various religions that took form during the last centuries of antiquity. Wherever men or women are inspired by belief in a single god to think or behave in a certain way, they bear witness to the abiding impact of this extraordinary, convulsive age.
In the Shadow of the Sword explores how a succession of great empires came to identify themselves with a new and revolutionary understanding of the divine. It is a tale vivid with drama, horror and startling achievement. But there are questions as well as stories. When did Judaism and Christianity finally and definitively split from one another? Where did Islam originate: in the depths of the desert or much further to the north? Are the claims made to this day by Jews, Christians and Muslims about the origins of their faiths all of them actually true?
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GuardianThe life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam are boldly re-examined in this brilliantly provocative history
In 706AD the caliph al-Walid decided to commission a building as a centrepiece for his new capital, Damascus. Only 74 years had passed since the death of the prophet Muhammad; the Arabs' new empire was still in the making, and there was no such thing as imperial Islamic architecture. The caliph found inspiration for his mosque in both Christian and pagan temple architecture. And while he built it on the site of one of the greatest of all Roman temples, demolishing the Christian church that stood inside the precincts, he incorporated many of the Roman stones, as well as the tomb of John the Baptist. For decoration, he brought Byzantine craftsmen over to piece together the vast gold mosaics.
The idea of borrowing is untroubling in architecture – we expect to see continuity and evolution in buildings. But the idea that religions evolve out of one another is more disturbing. Christians have choked on the notion that many of their rituals were borrowed from pagan rites. And heaven help the historian who dares to suggest that Islam might be a product of earlier religions and not, as the faithful insist, a revelation direct from God. Tom Holland has done exactly this in his brilliantly provocative new book – and we must hope that heaven is smiling on him now.
Holland is the author of two extremely successful works of ancient history – successful in both the creative and the commercial senses. In Rubicon, he traced the end of the Roman Empire. In Persian Fire, he focused on the fifth-century BC conflict between the Persians and Greeks, between east and west. In the Shadow of the Sword is a more ambitious and more important book.
The Roman and Persian empires are traditionally seen as collapsing into a void that our schoolbooks called the Dark Ages. Holland's thesis is that there was no void: depending on how you interpret the material, the decline of those empires led to the rise of the Arabs, or the rise of the Arabs led to their decline. To test this idea, Holland ranges around the centuries. Not content with bringing us the end of Rome, he mentions its foundation as well, something he also does with Judaism and the Israelites, with Jesus and Christians, with Zoroaster and the Persians.
He is a restless wanderer across the ancient world, both geographically and intellectually. Abraham, Isaac and Moses have walk-on parts, as do the emperors Constantine and Valerian, the empress Helen, Saint Simeon the Stylite (both of them, for it appears there were two) and a dazzling range of other characters from late antiquity. There are so many of them – and few stay around long enough for a reader without prior knowledge to get a real grip on them – that the narrative risks being overwhelmed by the comings and goings. But Holland is a skilful and energetic narrator, and while he guides us along the more intricate twists and turns of the period, he also keeps our eyes on the bigger story – on the revolution that brought down the old order and ushered in the new. For this was the period, Holland says, when allegiance to land, tribe or state was superseded by devotion to one almighty deity.
The assertion that Rome and Persia declined because of "the revelation of the word of God to His Prophet in far-off Mecca" is likely to be less controversial than Holland's examination of the details of the life of that prophet. He counters the widely accepted – and, to most Muslims, inviolable – view of Muhammad's life and the revelation of the Qur'an with what he calls "the traditions of secular scholarship". These traditions are based on an insistence on hard evidence and a demand that such evidence be scrutinised. The problem with the life of Muhammad is that there is almost no textual support for it until almost two centuries after his death. Holland is not going so far as to say that he never existed. Just that the account we have comes from the 800s, by which time Haroun al-Rashid was caliph over an empire that stretched from China to the Atlantic, and the 1,001 Nights was being compiled. The veracity of details and perhaps also some of the more important moments of the prophet's life were – are – impossible to prove.
The same goes for the Qur'an. There is no written mention of it in the period immediately following Muhammad – nor any commentary on it until the eighth century. Holland does not, perhaps, give enough weight to the value of oral tradition, the route by which the Qur'an is said to have been received (Muhammad is widely held to have been illiterate) and initially preserved. But his investigation does turn up some exciting possibilities as to the origin of the text and also to the location of Mecca: Holland points out that "there is not a shred of backing" in the Qur'an for locating Mecca in the Hijaz. The first text-based claim for its location in what we now know as Mecca, written a century or so after the revelation of the Qur'an, was a preposition "taken wholly for granted". He might be right, he might be wrong, but there is no denying that the challenge is both stimulating and, in a world of increasingly rigid Muslim dogma, refreshing.
The Qur'an anticipated the day of Holland's coming (or someone very like him). Sura 25 instructs Muslims to counter the claim that "these are fables of the ancients which he has got someone to write down for him" with the insistence that it was "revealed by Him Who knows every secret". For believers, these words are proof enough of the veracity of the Qur'an. Some have gone further and used them as justification for intellectual, legal and physical attacks on people who claim otherwise. The lives of some people who have dared to question the historicity of the prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an have been ruined, even ended. We must hope that Holland is spared their wrath and that his excellent book will be lauded, as it should be, for doing what the best sort of books can do – examining holy cows.
TelegraphReaders may be familiar with the fundamental changes that took place in the Roman world as it converted from paganism to Christianity in the fourth century, and as its emperors sought to govern, through the turbulent times of the fifth to seventh centuries, as Christian rulers.
This is the stuff of late antiquity as it would be recognised in any classics or history university department. It is, as Tom Holland points out in the opening pages of his latest book, a period of fundamental importance for the shape of our world, as it is the era in which religious monotheism, rather than political kingdom, comes to dominate history.
In that context, Holland focuses on the birth of Islam through the prophet Mohammed in Mecca and Medina (modern-day Saudi Arabia) during the course of the seventh century, as it is told to us by one of Mohammed’s biographers, Ibn Hisham, in the ninth century. The faith of Islam, as Holland points out, is centred on the study and strict observation of both the divine revelations to Mohammed (the Koran), and how Mohammed acted during his lifetime (the Hadith and the Sunna).
Yet, echoing what many (mostly non-Muslim) scholars have queried before, Holland points to the historical problem of the evidence: before 800AD, almost 200 years after Mohammed’s death in 632AD, the only “traces we possess” for the development of Islam “are either the barest shreds of shreds, or else the delusory shimmering of mirages”.
The task Holland sets himself is to ask what can be done about that gap. His answer is to approach it from the opposite direction: to approach the origins of Islam from its recent past, from the world of fifth to seventh century late antiquity. “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 examines late antiquity not as an age of decline and fall, but of energy and inventiveness, setting the Arab world and Mohammed’s life in the context of the changing geographies, cultures and priorities of the empires of Rome around the Mediterranean, the Sassanians to the East, and the religious and cultural melting-pot of the “Holy Land”, which connected them. Holland identifies key events, places, ideas and decisions within the Persian and Roman systems which may have impacted upon the Arab world, and, in turn, on the birthplace of Islam in Mecca and Medina.
In so doing, Holland argues for the forging of Islam in the political and military instability and opportunity of a world convulsed by a changing balance of power. The process, he continues, ensured that, by the ninth century, “a version of Islam’s beginnings that gave no scope for anyone to rule as a Deputy of God”, and in turn no room “for acknowledging the momentous role in the forging of Islam by countless others”, had gained acceptance, the continued presence of which, inevitably, makes Holland’s thesis difficult reading for an Islamic audience.
Focusing on the wider context to unpick key moments in history is a classic Holland approach, echoing, for example, his study of the fifth century BC Persian invasion of Greece in Persian Fire (2005), which explored the context and prior history of the Persian and Greek worlds. Such an approach is now in vogue, because it demands that the historian break the often stifling disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally governed the study of worlds which knew no such boundaries.
This is a handsome volume, tackling an important question from a novel perspective, backed by useful notes and written in an accessible and fluid style. But, as I am sure Holland would accept, in part because of the charged nature of the material and issues on which it dwells, and in part because of the vast developments and arenas it attempts to encompass, it is also bound to encounter the full spectrum of critical reaction.
Financial TimesTom Holland, author of Rubicon (2004) and Persian Fire (2006), is perhaps the only writer of popular ancient history to whom the adjective “bestselling” can be accurately applied. His modus operandi is big juicy topics with a strong whiff of contemporary relevance. A new book from Holland is a big event for publishers and booksellers alike, particularly when its subject is the thorny issue of the origins of Islam.
In fact, despite the publicity hype that has sought to clad this book in the lucrative cloak of controversy, Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword is a characteristically eloquent and necessarily broad-brush study of the rise of monotheism in the eastern Mediterranean and Near-East from the third to seventh centuries AD. It is the epic saga of how the Christianity, Judaism and Islam we know today were all products of a radical re-ordering of the religious landscape of the ancient world – a revolution predicated on the existence of one universal all-powerful deity. This was an epoch marked by seismic religious, cultural and political changes as the old world order of the warring empires of Persia and Constantinople found themselves swept aside by the seemingly unstoppable new force of Islam.
Holland introduces us to the agents of this revolution: often brilliant minds whose weapon of choice was the pen rather than the sword. In a whirlwind tour, we meet Jewish scholars heroically toiling to preserve the very existence of their community in its Babylonian exile through the creation of the Talmud, a written record of rabbinic learning on an extraordinarily wide range of issues (including a cure for migraines that required the pouring of the blood of a dead rooster over the sufferer’s scalp). In Persia, we are introduced to the fire-worshipping Zoroastrian priesthood opportunistically using the first-ever transcription of the mathra, the word of God, to promote themselves as the equal partners, rather than subordinates, of the previously all-powerful king. Finally, in the Roman empire, we witness ingenious Christian theologians bringing the interests of the earthly and celestial kingdoms into perfect alignment, and presenting increasingly acquiescent emperors with the seductive mantra of “One Emperor, One God”.
Yet, as Holland points out, the flipside of the longed-for certainties that all this brilliance and inventiveness engendered was an irreversible diminution in the religious horizons of both the Roman and Persian worlds. In the Roman empire, those whose beliefs did not fit into the increasingly rigid parameters of what constituted orthodox imperial Christianity found themselves on the receiving end of increasing intolerance and persecution. In the sixth centuries AD this depressing inability to accommodate any religious dissent, real or imagined, was further exacerbated by decades of resource-sapping, futile on/off warfare between the Roman and Persian empires.
A new and potent force, that to many contemporaries appeared to have sprung from nowhere, would ruthlessly exploit the resultant power vacuum. To the cultivated Roman or Persian eye, the Arabs were indeed from nowhere: the howling deserts and wildernesses that sat brooding on the fringes of the civilised world. Yet within a century or so their armies had managed to conquer much of the eastern Roman empire, bringing about the total collapse of Persia – a vast area that included Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the Levant. What was the secret of their success? The Arab scholars who two centuries later picked over these tumultuous events knew the answer. It lay in the teaching of the great prophet Mohammed whose divine revelations had given the Arabs “the courage and sheer self-confidence to go eyeball-to-eyeball with their former masters”.
For Holland, however, the story of Islam’s emergence in the isolation of the deserts around Mecca, hermeneutically sealed and unsullied by all previous religious experience, will simply not do. Taking his cue from the sceptical scholarship that has long predominated in some academic circles, Holland argues that the extensive body of exegetical, legal and historical texts written by Islamic scholars under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries AD – the main traditional sources for early Islam – reflect the concerns and agendas of the period in which they were written, rather than the earlier times they claim to faithfully record. “History, unlike faith,” Holland states perhaps a little too piously, “cannot be built upon foundations of sand.”
Yet once the blinkers of revisionism and hindsight are thrown off, the author has little difficulty finding the good solid bedrock on which a history of early Islam can be constructed. He argues that the Romans and Persians would have found much that was familiar in the theocratic pronouncements of the Arab invaders. For what they were listening to were their own words and ideas, reworked and repackaged for a different age and audience. The relationship between the nascent Islam and the empires that it overran was never a simple case of the supplanting of the old with the new. For Holland, early Islam was forged in a religious and cultural melting pot where Persian Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism and Gnosticism were all common currency, all which it liberally borrowed from.
In the Shadow of the Sword is an exhilarating read because Holland succeeds in capturing much of the excitement, strangeness and importance of a long past age – albeit one with a very contemporary resonance. It is difficult not to be bedazzled by a cast that includes ulcerated Christian holy men, Zoroastrian priests obsessed with dental hygiene, demonic emperors, barbarians with self-inflicted cranial deformities, perfumed Persian monarchs and Arab ambassadors stinking of camel.
At times, Holland’s ultra-sceptical line on the genesis of Islam means that he undercuts his own argument. Take, for example, his thesis that Islam hailed from what is now Jordan, rather than the desert fastness of Mecca. Good evidence exists from pre-Islamic texts that Mecca was already a holy site. And if much of the history of early Islam is fabricated, then how to explain the consensus that exists across a range of texts from bitterly opposed sectarian communities (Sunni, Shia, etc)? Do we really believe that an entire community invested in this vast lie about the prophet, and that somehow some shadowy force was able to control all dissenting opinion within Arab circles?
One of the most striking lessons to emerge from Holland’s study is the power of the written word to transform communities and foster dialogue. My fear is that in taking such a sceptical and confrontational approach there is a danger that In the Shadow of the Sword will merely end up preaching to the converted and that its important message about the shared roots of three of the great world religions will otherwise fall on deaf ears.
Release date: Out now
