Periodically people ask me my opinion of Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. I don’t have an opinion because I haven’t read it. Many years ago I took an interest in the topic of Islamic revisionism, and from what I can tell the field hasn’t moved that much in terms of clarity. Rather, Holland’s project in the book has been to repackage it for lay audiences.
Basically, it seems Holland wants to do to Islam what has happened to Christianity over the past few centuries in the West: turn it into a natural phenomenon and not part of the numen of the cosmos. Though a fair number of traditionalist Christian believers exist, many people who say they are Christians are often quite aware of revisionist theories about their religion. It’s not taboo or shocking. It’s just the norm.
Consider Candida Moss’s book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. Moss is a Roman Catholic, who published The Myth of Persecution while a professor of the New Testament at Roman Catholic Notre Dame University. As the title indicates Moss challenges one of the foundational beliefs about the rise of early Christianity: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” And yet she remains identified as a Christian, a professor of the New Testament.
Most educated Christians are probably vaguely aware that the four gospels were written between 70 AD and 100 AD. And, because of the Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code many people are aware that the development of early Christianity was to some extent a cumulative process (even though Brown’s description is totally off base).
Before the 19th century, most Christians did not even comprehend that their religion could be viewed in such a critical-rationalist manner. They were not necessarily “fundamentalists” as we would understand them. Some apologists for Catholicism arguing against early scripturalist Reformers even pointed out inconsistencies within the Bible to illustrate the futility of sola scriptura. But, Christians accepted their traditions and beliefs in a relatively innocent manner (though the debunking of the Donation of Constantine occurred rather early).
The vast majority of Muslims today are where Christians were several centuries ago. Even liberal Muslims, or atheists from a Muslim background, tend to accept the traditional view as the view which they reject piecemeal or in totality. As for as the origins and rise of Islam and the Arab empires, Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests lays out the traditional received model.
Kennedy’s book focuses on the Umayyads, the first hereditary dynasty of the Islamic world (an earlier book was on the Abbasids-When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World). Kennedy does not write from the perspective of a Muslim historian, but a Western historian who takes the Muslim sources at face value (he acknowledges in the introduction that there is a revisionist view, though that is not his book).
The story is a simple one. Muhammad founds a new monotheistic religion in pagan Arabia, and after his death in 632 the tribes united in the faith explode out of their desolate peninsula. In 636 these forces defeat both the Romans and the Persians. Within a few decades the Muslims rule a vast swath of territory, and in 661 the Umayyad dynasty is inaugurated with the reign of Muawiya I, who reputation and fame would likely be greater if history had not been written by the enemies of his dynasty. One of the reasons that the Umayyads have a low reputation is that their interpretation of Islam was closely tied to their Arab tribal identity. Their religion was not quite the trans-ethnic one that would flourish under the Abbasids. Some Islamic scholars even called the Umayyads the “Arab Kingdom” (the title “king” is considered un-Islamic).
What is the revisionist story that Holland wants to tell? The outline is simple: in the first two generations after the Arab conquest, the Arabs were not Muslims as we, or they, would understand it. Holland specifically seems to believe that Islam as a religious ideology that bounds together the Arab ruling class of the Umayyad domains crystallized during the reign of Abd al-Malik in the 680s AD. This is fifty years after the death of Muhammed, and nearly four decades after the conquest of the Near East and Persia.
There are is a lot more to what Holland believes went down. To get a good sense, watch his 2012 documentary on Youtube.
Do I believe it? Obviously, I don’t believe that Muhammad is a prophet of God, since I don’t believe in God. But, that doesn’t mean that Muhammad didn’t think he was a prophet of God and that his followers were insincere. The rise of Islam is a fundamentally material affair. There is no magic. That would come later with Sufi saints with miraculous powers.
One reason we can have this debate is that the sources are sparse and vague. This may sound strange to say, but as an example, we have very little written records that come down from pre-Islamic Persia. For our knowledge of the ancient and early medieval world we are faced with three major periods of massive literary production: in Baghdad in the 9th century, under Charlemagne in the 9th, in Constantinople in the 10th. The 7th century was a period of stress and deprivation in the East Roman Empire, as it lost massive territory to the Arabs. But one thing that seems clear is that these East Romans did not have a clear sense of the Arabs as practitioners of a new world religion that was not Christian. They were clear that they were ethnic Arabs, but not clear that they were anything but heretics or some sort.
The sparsity of “non-traditional” sources means that revisionists have to engage in deep philological analysis of the extant sources, an enterprise which is beyond the ken of non-specialists to evaluate. I have no strong opinions on whether Muhammad existed or not. Nor am I sure that Mecca and Medina as holy sites were later additions to the history of Islam (revisionists tend to believe that the Arabs emerged out of the Syrian desert, not from further south). I suspect in a lot of the details Holland is incorrect. But I do not think that the orthodox view is correct in the details either.
The Late Antique world was not as neatly sectarian as we might imagine. It was messily sectarian. The advance of Islam in the domains under the rule of the Arab Caliphates was uneven. Substantial regions of Iran proper remained under the rule of Zoroastrian kings as late as the 9th century, and Muslims were probably not a majority in Iran until the 10th century.
The Levant and Mesopotamia had a Christian majority for centuries under the rule of the Umayyads and Abbasids. In The Rise of Western Christendom Peter Brown claims that Islamicization in the Near East was associated with Arabicization. That is, once Christian populations switched to Arabic as their everyday language, conversion to Islam became much more feasible.
But knowing what we know about other religions it seems implausible to me that Islamic emerged out of the desert in the fully formed manner that Muslim tradition implies. The rise of Christianity is a clear case of debates, arguments, and gradual rough consensus over a period of decades and later centuries. When it comes to younger religions such as that of the Bahai or Mormonism, we can see in “real time” how religions can evolve after the death of their founders. The Bahai religion has its roots in Shia revivalism, but eventually, it transformed itself into a post-Muslim world religion. Though Mormons retain a Christian identity, their theology is extremely exotic in comparison to the Christian mainstream.
The Umayyad positive attitudes toward Late Antique Hellenism and their total co-option of the East Roman system is suggestive of a barbarian conquest elite, not an ideologically motivated one. The Rashidun period and the life of Muhammad may always be mysteries to us, but they almost certainly do point to unlikely events in the Arabian Peninsula (or its liminal zone) which resulted in the military mobilization of Arabs bent on conquest. Islam’s emergence in a form more recognizable to us in the late 7th century may have been an inevitable result of declining cohesion of the Arab conquest elite, and the necessity of an ideology to bind them together, along with notables from conquered populations.
And of course, we know that the 8th and 9th centuries saw the transformation of Islam in a deeper and more thoroughgoing manner, with the shift to the east of the Abbassids and the emergence of the ulema class and the marginalizations of philosophy. But that needed the ideology of empire, and that ideology did not emerge de novo from the desert. Islam did not create an empire, the empire necessitated the precipitation of Islam.
It should also be remembered that the Arabs of Century VII were not the only barbarians from the fringes of civilization to irrupt into the Eurasian Ecumene and become rulers of a large swath of it. Mongols, Manchu, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks are other examples. In fact it is a fairly common phenomenon.
Another factor is one referred too in the previous post. A series of disasters such as prolonged cold periods and epidemics swept across the Eurasian Ecumene during Century VI. The Greek and Persian Empires that ruled in Western and Central Asia at the end of Century VI and were overun by the Arabs were much weaker in terms of resources than they had been in previous eras.
Minor correction: three gospels, Mark, Luke and Matthew, are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels, with Mark thought to have been written first; they diverge widely from John in content, which is thought to have been written some time after 100 AD.
“At a dinner held at the King’s House, Rastas claimed that acting Jamaican Prime Minister Donald Sangster had stamped his foot at Lulu, Haile Selassie’s pet chihuahua, who, they swore, had responded with the roar of a lion.[9]
Defying expectations of the Jamaican authorities,[10] Selassie never rebuked the Rastafari for their belief in him as the Messiah. Instead, he presented the movement’s faithful elders with gold medallions bearing the Ethiopian seal – the only recipients of such an honour on this visit.[9][11] Meanwhile, he presented some of the Jamaican politicians, including Sangster, with miniature coffin-shaped cigarette boxes.”
I was partial to the idea that “Islam as a religious ideology that bounds together the Arab ruling class of the Umayyad domains crystallized during the reign of Abd al-Malik in the 680s AD., i.e., 50 years after the death of the prophet”. This idea comes from the fact that Uthman had much to consolidate as a single Koran, and he was from an Ummayad family. The transition to Muawiyah, rather easily, suggests that Uthman and Muawiyah has nearly as much to do in consolidating a single quran and one Islam that was passed on by the prophet.
I bought this book thinking it will do justice to such an idea, but, it does not. Perhaps Holland has too much “fictionary” prose. When he talks about events, his prose deceives take this literally, rather than being imaginary. There are all kinds of stories with prose like this “”In 527, five years before work began on Hagia Sophia, a small boy named Simeon had trotted through the bazaars and shanty-towns of Antioch, blah blah blah and up the slopes of a nearby mountain. Its rugged heights were no place for a child, nor for anyone with a care for comfort” and soon you are lost in stories that have no relevance to the topic. The style is a time-traveling fashion that it’s hard to keep the timelines straight. The first 300 pages is not related to the topic in hand, but about 6th century constantinople and Jerusalem; I learnt entirely too much about 541 plague.
The final 25% tries to conjecture how Islamic amnesia towards the creation of the Quran, was created. There is some claim that city of the Prophet was not Mecca, and he wastes a good 20 pages on this. He works to the idea that Uthman’s sanitization of the Quran, and the uniformity of Islam was complete with the domination f the Abbasids who allowed the ulema to rise to religious supremacy, with the basic idea that attributes almost every single thing of value in Islam to the Prophet. In doing this, Abal Malik was just following the Sassanids and some Roman Kings in that their kingdom was a favor by gods, in exchange to attributing everything to prophet, who was speaking for god. But nothing in the book proves this. That is a waste of 10 dollars.
So, you lost nothing by not reading this book; both, Holland and Crone have ideas that often cannot be proved, but they still stretch it.
I think Robert Hoyland’s (a student of Crone’s) approach towards Islamic historiography is the best – tempering Islamic sources with non-Muslim ones. In general, from the books of his that I’ve read, he generally accepts the standard Islamic historical narrative in broad strokes but argues much of the details were embellished or made to conform to a propagandist narrative for the Abbasids or the ulema.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the more traditional narratives and not the out-there “everything about early Islam is fiction”-type things is the Zuhayr Inscription:
https://www.academia.edu/3576977/The_Inscription_of_Zuhayr_the_oldest_Islamic_Inscription_AH_24_AD_644_
It’s a graffito that quite simply records that Omar, the second Caliph, has died, dates to the correct period and has the correct date recorded on it.
The most interesting part of it is that it only has half the shahada as is typical of the pre-Abd al Malik-era. That the statement “Muhammad is the prophet of God” wasn’t added to the declaration of faith of Muslims until Abd al Malik is a recorded fact of history, but what it implies is a guessing game.
i’ve read hoyland (on holland’s recommendation!). good stuff.
There are more literal Islamic calligraphy reading faculty, Sean Anthony of OSU, marjin van Putten at Leiden. This is the golden age of reading through Islamic literature of quranic era.
A bizarre thing I learnt after reading them, I found that even before the Islamic conquest, Sassanids had knocked down the Byzantines in 614-628 AD in Jerusalem and Damascus. Wikipedia reads
“The Sasanian Persians were joined by Nehemiah ben Hushiel[6] and Benjamin of Tiberias (a man of immense wealth), who enlisted and armed Jewish soldiers from Tiberias, Nazareth and the mountain cities of Galilee, and together with a band of Arabs and additional Jews from southern parts of the country they marched on Jerusalem. Some 20,000 Jewish rebels joined the war against the Byzantine Christians.[7] Depending on the chronicler figures of either 20,000 or 26,000 are given.[1] The Persian army reinforced by Jewish forces led by Nehemiah ben Hushiel and Benjamin of Tiberias would capture Jerusalem without resistance.”
Between 622 and 628, all hell was breaking loose in jerusalem, constatntinople led by Khosrau, but nary a mention of what is happening a few hundred miles south in mecca? Khosrau was leading Jews, Arabs, and slave soldiers over the entire Mediterranean coast, destroying the Christians, armies much larger than anything the prophet commanded, but there is no mention of the new phenomenon raising south?
Sorry to post twice;
sean Anthony is at “https://osu.academia.edu/SeanAnthony”.
An interesting account of Kaabah is provided in https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/936259614676570112.
A first inscription of “no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger” in https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/936259614676570112. This is in 697AD.
Pre Abdel Malik, there was no “Muhammad is the prophet of God” .
All of this suggests something happened between 646 AD and 686 AD.