IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD

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Forthcoming book.
Review by Christopher Hart in Sunday Times.(25/3/2012)

Short excerpt below:

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD: The Battle for Empire and the end of The Ancient World
By Tom Holland
In scholarly circles there is a growing amount of doubt about the origins of the Koran. Holland’s great achievement is to popularise such scholarship, turning it into narrative history, and a fiendishly complex detective story. Where did Islam come from? Who were the first Muslims? And what on earth is the extraordinary, often bewildering text called the Koran?...
It gradually becomes clear that Islam was not originally a separate religion from Christianity or Judaism at all. The “first Muslims” didn’t even call themselves Muslims, but “Believers”. They saw themselves as followers of the same monotheism as Judaeo-Christianity, regarded Moses and Jesus as prophets and so on.
As for the Koran, like the Bible, it is evidently a text both man-made and sacred. Astonishingly, today’s “authentic” single version of the Koran was established in Cairo only in 1924. Before that, there were seven equally valid “readings”. Much of it derives from the Jewish Old, and Christian New Testament, and it has been repeatedly revised since.. The earliest verses we know of are not in manuscript but appear on the walls of The Dome of The Rock mosque in Jerusalem built in AD691 –and they differ from the same verses in today’s Koran. Another key element of Islam, its Sunnah (body of law) seems to originate – at least in part – from before the life of Mohammed, in the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, and the teachings of Jewish rabbis…
For Muslims, such prickly facts are blasphemously incompatible with the notion of the Koran as the eternal and immutable word of Allah, and cause immense internal stress, denial and, ultimately outward hostility. Can Islam evolve to withstand the powerful solvent of modernism, as Christianity appears to have done? Or will it retain the angry fearfulness of fundamentalism?
Every bit as thrilling a narrative history as Holland’s previous works, In The Shadow of the Sword is also a profoundly important book. It makes public and popular what scholarship has been discovering for several decades now: and those discoveries suggest a wholesale revision of where Islam came from and what it is.



Sounds interesting? I knew some of this already, but Western historians and theologists don't usually dare to go there (e.g. Karen Armstrong).

Is Tom Holland likely to be a good guide? Should western authors even dare to go near such a prickly subject? (Some people think it's best not to apply western standards/scholarship/expectations to Islam?)

[fortigurn]

Moderate and liberal Islam has been dealing with these issues for well over 100 years, and they've been aired frequently in academic discourse. I expect this to continue.

[sandwiches]

Fairly favourable review here:

www.spectator.co.uk/books/7746568/prophetic-times.thtml

For the most part, students of Islam’s earliest period have the tendency to couch their arguments in extremely guarded terms, verging on a sort of code. Holland is to be congratulated on setting out the terms of the argument with clarity. His central point about the emergence of Islam as a political and cultural force is that it does not appear from the desert like a clean wind, as the tradition asserts. Its culture comes through at a specific historical point, and it can be shown to rest on the ruins of previous civilisations. It learnt from the successes and failures of other great movements.

But 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

Hope it doesn't excite undue hostility. But then I suppose Hitchens said some of this rather more rudely in God is Not Great.

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And another one:

Though reviewer seems not quite convinced by some of Holland's theories on the emergence of Islam:

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-the-shadow-of-the-sword-by-tom-holland-7600583.html

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.

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.

[sandwiches]

Interesting article from Brian Appleyard about the background to and possible implications of Holland's book:

www.bryanappleyard.com/the-truth-of-islam/

The Truth of Islam
Sunday Times, 25 March 2012

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Another excellent review:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/05/shadow-sword-islam-tom-holland-review?newsfeed=true

The life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam are boldly re-examined in this brilliantly provocative history

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...
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...
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".

[endrefodstad]

I just finished it. I wasn't that impressed with Millenium, and this one is better. Still, it could have been a lot better. He does good work in the initial parts of the book, describing Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity (and lots of little other cults) and how these religions' adherents related to the political reality of their world. I also liked his initial tour-without-a-map of early Islam: he really hammers the point down about how little we actually know about the first couple of hundred years. Unfortunately, he is unable to tie the book properly together at the end, and it sort of peters out rather than ending with the bang it really deserved. If one can call the founding of Baghdad "petering out".

[sandwiches]

Still waiting for the arrival of my copy

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About halfway through this and enjoying it. Hard to say how reliable Holland's views on Islam are but note a very hostile review here with apparent response from Tom Holland:

www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/04/review-shadow-sword-tom-holland

His answer is to present a revisionist history based almost exclusively on the work of a largely discredited group of orientalists. In the process, he pours scorn on Muslim scholarship, which is declared unsound, if not totally worthless, and lays into classical Muslim biographers and historians.

Innocent readers will no doubt conclude that Muslims know nothing about Muhammad or the Quran. Apparently, our historians knew little about objectivity or criticism, which is the sole preserve of Holland and his orien­talist friends!

[himself]

Notice the code-word "orientalist."

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Another very hostile review:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/04/in-shadow-of-sword-tom-holland

In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland – review
A swashbuckling study of the origins of Islam
Glen Bowersock


He has written his book in a swashbuckling style that aims more to unsettle his readers than to instruct them. I have not seen a book about Arabia that is so irresponsible and unreliable since Kamal Salibi's The Bible Came from Arabia (1985).
For some reason Holland's book was released in the Netherlands in Dutch before it appeared in English. It had a different title then, The Fourth Beast. A marketing strategy of this kind looks like a conscious effort to profit from recent Dutch anxiety over Muslim immigrants. But Holland's cavalier treatment of his sources, ignorance of current research and lack of linguistic and historical acumen serve to undermine his provocative narrative. In the Shadow of the Sword seems like an attempt by author, agent and publisher to create a very different account of early Islam, but fortunately the quality of the book stands in the way.


It's rough in the world of historians eh? Actually Holland makes some rather decent points in reply?:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/07/tom-holland-responds-glen-bowersock?newsfeed=true


Tom Holland responds to Glen Bowersock's review of In the Shadow of the Sword
Many scholars would now agree that the origins of the Qur'an are obscure, so why does Glen Bowersock's review of my book suggest it is reprehensible to bring this to light?

Bowersock is a formidable scholar for whom I have great admiration – and his most recent work on ancient Ethiopia shows him to be as on the ball as ever. But this review, which is targetted not just at me but at an entire efflorescence in contemporary scholarship, is unworthy of him. Far from it being inappropriate to place the rise of Islam in the context of "languages and ideas floating around in the Near East", the truly inappropriate thing, I would suggest, is to veil an important trend in scholarship from the gaze of the general public, and to scold those who would seek to lift it.



Well, I don't know what to make of it all, and I haven't even finished the book yet!

[ulyssesrex]

I enjoyed it. Holland's something of a curate's egg for me, Rubicon was excellent, Persian Fire less so, too many strained parallels with the present day and far too shallow an approach to either Greece or Persia, even taking into account that it was a popular work. Millennium was pretty good- I admired it's ambition but the individual sections were less impressive- you can't help comparing it with other general works on the Vikings, the early Holy Roman Empire, the rise of the Papacy or the Crusades etc. In the Shadow of the Sword was weakened by a too obvious attempt at apeing Gibbon . But it was well written and extremely evocative much of the time, capturing the clash of Empires and the religious controversies well but in a rather scrappy way. The chapters on Islam were by far the most interesting and provocative as historians of the period often tend to steer away from providing theories for the development of Islam that conflict with the official story, concentrating upon the military, social and political ramifications. In a way I find the idea of its creation on the borderline between the Eastern Roman and Persian Empires, adapting ideas found in both, rather than in an almost hermetically sealed capsule further south, more plausible. It places Islam within the context of a rich and disputatious Near Eastern culture and also helps explain the remarkable conquests of the early decades. Of course this doesn't chime well with traditionalists and casts a shadow over the (later?) centrality of Mecca but I think that Holland and the specialists whose theories he is popularizing are doing a considerable service as historians by engaging in this thorny debate.

[himself]

Review in the Wall Street Journal
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304050304577378091511934480.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecondBucket

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Re the Wall St Journal review:

Some early Muslim authorities expressed doubts about the historical value of the hadiths, as do scholars raised in the rigorous traditions of modern textual criticism. The problem, however, is that the edifice of hadiths—including those from which the narrative of the prophet's life was constructed some two centuries after his death—now constitute the sunna, the prophet's exemplary custom, which forms the foundations of Islamic law and practice. To abandon the hadiths, the liberal scholar Fazlur Rahman argued in 1965, would be to open up a "yawning chasm of fourteen centuries" between the time of the prophet and today's believers.
As a historian of late antiquity Mr. Holland can afford to ignore such inhibitions. He fills the "yawning chasm" of our knowledge with evidence culled from a much wider variety of sources—Zoroastrian and Persian, Jewish and Roman, Christian and Gnostic—than are usually considered by specialists. Without discarding the role of supernatural agencies altogether, he contextualizes them within the broader framework of the beliefs about religion, politics, power and authority that characterized the world of late antiquity.

Mr. Holland admits that his answers are "unashamedly provisional," but he traces a broad arc that connects the rise of Islam with the religious themes that accompanied the decline of the imperial systems of Rome, Byzantium and Persia. His conclusions may be tentative, but they are convincing. His book is elegantly written and refreshingly free from specialist jargon. Marshaling its resources with dexterity, it is a veritable tour de force.



I appreciate that Holland is not versed in medieval Arabic and has no formal qualifications in Islamic history (and neither am/have I) and I have not quite finished the book (he lays an awful lot of groundwork - justifiably I think - before actually getting to the kernel of his theories on the origins of Islam) but this seems the most thoughtful review I have seen so far.

The limited reaction I have seen so far from Islamic-sympathetic websites to the book is fairly visceral and/or takes to quoting Koranic verses about the Koran and opponents of Islam. The thesis of the Book tends to appeal most immediately to those who have already got an axe to grind and the immediate criticism comes from those whose criticisms of opposing views tends to spring from ingrained views rather than use of any critical faculty?

The Koran and the hadiths seem to derive from a fascinating cocktail of influences. But eventually, one suspects Western, secular approaches to history will seep through to a wider audience and it will be interesting to see how significant an influence this will be on Islam.

Holland has been admirable in turning up to politely defend his views against criticism from hostile websites and reviews - and has achieved a rather wider audience and is less easily-dismissed than the likes of Robert Spencer with his "Did Muhammad exist?" I gather there are plans to translate and distribute the latter on the Web. The latter tends toward internet propaganda. Holland maybe goes a bit far on certain points but can't be dismissed as propaganda.

[sandwiches]

Well, enjoyed the book very much. The views on the origins of the hadith (and Jewish influence in relation to the same) was fascinating. Holland seems to accept that the origins of the Koran itself seems to go back to the time of Muhammad though it still seems an open question how much it had to do with Muhammad himself.

I note in this respect the following from Larry Hurtado's site:

larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/a-new-network-for-quranic-studies/


A New Network for Quranic Studies

The following press release just arrived:

The (American-based) Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) has been awarded a $140,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support a three-year consultation that will explore the formation of an independent network of Quranic scholars. This international consultation will meet to evaluate and frame a vision and mission for a professional organization, namely, a Society for Quranic Studies.

As Hurtado infers, The Koran doesn't yet seem to have been subject to the same intensity of study and criticism as to its origins and transmission as the Bible and perhaps Muslim apologists make rather smug assumptions about The Koran in this respect, based simply on traditional beliefs. Any insights that might emerge, particularly as to the extent and depth of influence of other religions on its formation would be fascinating.