In The Shadow Of The Sword - Tom Holland
In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World - Tom Holland
Non-Fiction
Pages: 592
Despite what adherents and clerics have believed and claimed from time immemorial, in reality no religion ever appears in a vacuum, in a divinely inspired flash of light fully formed and internally coherent. All religions, from Islam to Christianity, Zoroastrianism to Buddhism, Hinduism to Manichaeism, all owe more than a little to the time and place of their origin, to the political currents circulating at the time, to the cultures and beliefs surrounding them; and all evolve over time, this doctrine being added, that dogma being dropped. Islam is no different. This book is the history of those origins, the context, the time and the place of Islam's birth. Obviously, it goes without saying that Holland is taking a historical approach here, treating the Qur'an like any other historical document, rather than a religious text.
Islam more than anything else is the product of a global confrontation between two superpowers - the Eastern Roman and Persian Sasanian Empires - and the battleground that the Middle East became as these two giants tussled over their borders. The traditional history of the era is that Islam burst out of the desert, unknown and unexpected, inspired by religious fervour, and took both these empires unaware, overwhelming them both in a matter of decades and establishing an empire that in one form or another lasted until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Tom Holland's central argument is that Islam is a product of both these empires, a hybrid in many ways, influenced and shaped by crucial elements of both empires' official religions, Christianity and Zoroastrianism and could not have been forged anywhere else. He also argues that Islam as we know it, in its written and codified form, only really came into being after the Islamic Empire had been established; that it was not Islam per se that inspired the martial success of the Arabs but Muhammed and his followers' success in marshalling the disparate tribes into a unified force, inspired by an embryo version of Islam, it's true; that even after the established of the Umayyad Caliphate political dynasty many Muslims were practicing a form of Islam that still borrowed heavily from earlier pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Judaic religious practices; and that the written version of the Qur'an is heavily influenced by earlier Christian and Judaic writings and was in many places written as a direct response to political and military events taking place many years after Muhammed's life.
Challenging the origins of any religious text is controversial to those who believe in its divine truth, and I've no doubt this book has probably raised a few hackles. But I found it a truly fascinating depiction of an era in history I knew very little about. I must confess I have never heard of the Sasanian Empire before this book, or the Hephthalite Empire, or much about the Eastern Roman Empire beyond its base in Constantinople. I've heard all the usual stories about Muhammed's birth, his life in Mecca, the flight to Medina - but to read about the historical questions and doubts behind the religious tales was eye-opening, much as it is with the gaps between established Christian 'fact' and actual historical reality. I would recommend this to anyone interested in the origins of Islam - or quite frankly, to anyone interested in religious history, or just history. Tom Holland is an excellent historian and a fine writer, and I am sure even if you started this book uninterested in the topic or the era you wouldn't finish it thinking the same.