In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire [Hardcover]

The book aims to explain Late Antiquity up to 600 AD, and to show how Islam developed from that up to 800 AD. Historians have much better records for Late Antiquity than they have for the first century of Islam - as this book notes and as many other historians have noted (and lamented). The bulk of the book amounts to an introductory overview; the origins of Islam takes up only the last third of it and this part reads more like an argumentary essay.

The prose is florid, yet interspersed with vulgarities. Holland is inordinately fond of the low, cant term "screwed" when discussing... tax extraction. This style felt to me like he was trying too hard to keep my interest.

Fortunately the book has marshaled an impressive array of facts behind its narrative. I was impressed that it had stayed so close to the cutting edge, especially in the Persia / Parthia sections. Much of that material distills Pourshariati, "Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire"; that book came out only in 2008.

The book is careful to contrast classical Islamic jargon against the way people (including Arabs) thought during the 600s. Two examples are "Quraysh" (from Syriac), who might not have coalesced into an Arabian tribe yet; and "Maqam" (from Hebrew), which back then meant "holy site". The book could have gone further - it applies the apocalyptic term Fitna to the First Civil War, but that term likely wasn't used for this war except amongst the Kufan Shi'a. Another scholar GHA Juynboll in the early 1980s showed that most Muslims agreed to apply Fitna only to the (far more destructive) Second Civil War.

Holland addresses the scholarly arguments over Islamic origins obliquely. I read in p. 306 that the scholarly consensus claims to have "disproved" that the Qur'an is a forgery... but the footnote 22 refers only to Wansbrough, Rippin and Hawting - all of whom argue that the Qur'an is, in fact, a forgery after all (wouldn't a better link point to the consensus, with the skeptics as a sub-footnote?). Later on, he'll note several contradictions between Arab rule and orthodox Islam, for instance Mu'awiya's consistent reference to the Crucifixion of Christ (which, as Holland points out, sura 4 denies). I suspect that he personally prefers the skeptic side; his book just won't admit it.

He is (much) more openly skeptical about the history of Mecca. He doesn't think Muhammad ever set foot there and he doesn't even think that the Zubayrite anticaliphate was based there. I felt whipsawed to see him (ostensibly) support the Qur'an and then to reject MECCA.

I wasn't convinced on the details of his argument; and I think that was because he hadn't fully convinced *himself* of it, or even fully formulated it when he submitted this manuscript. But that was just the last third. Up to then, the book was a real page-turner, exquisitely detailed and informative.

The book's wealth of detail holds value to all who are interested in Islamic origins. The book as a whole is also helpful as an introduction to Late Antiquity, especially Persian Late Antiquity (which we may now have to start calling, Partho-Persian). I have no problem in recommending this to others with a grain of salt for the end.

[This book was a gift to me; but the donor did buy it via Amazon.]
[Also, a disclosure: At the time of posting this review, May 2012, I was writing a book of my own. My book partly depends upon this book and some might consider my book a rival (although I never intended to rival this book). I stand by my (4/5) rating and by the text of this review.]

If you didn't know the author, the title of this book and its cover illustration - a fallen helmet with vacant staring eye-sockets lying in the desert sand - give the impression of an epic historical novel. Distribution too; I bought a soft cover "airport edition" - a channel better known for promoting the latest books by best-selling authors. Although in its style and structure it reads like a novel - somewhat florid prose, and dramatic interruptions in the narrative to allow the reader to catch up on another part of the plot - anyone who buys the book under this expectation will soon realize that what they actually have is a hardcore history book.

It is essentially an attempt to present a historical account of Mohammed and the early history of Islam, as opposed to the idealized version subsequently enshrined in the religion that was founded in the name of the prophet. In order to achieve this, the author traces the development of the three major religions of antiquity - Christianity, Judaism and the Zoroastrianism of the Sassanian Persian empire. This forms the essential context for explaining the rapid spread of Islam on the back of the Arab conquest of the ancient east early in the seventh century. He describes how some form of monotheism was by this time already pervasive in most of what we call the middle east. And this did not exclude the Arabs; thousands had moved north, where they could make a profitable living, policing the borders of both Byzantine and Sassanian empires as mercenaries, and where at the same time they were likely to have been influenced by the winds of monotheism. Crucially, he presents compelling arguments why Mecca - a thousand miles south in the middle of the Arabian Desert - could not have been the flourishing entrepot and major pre-Islamic religious center which Muslim tradition (although not the Qu'ran) would have it. Instead, he locates the place from which the prophet migrated to Medina and then returned to in triumph as somewhere on the Palestinian/Syrian border - perhaps even Mamre, where Abraham - the father of the Arabs as well as of the Jews, had pitched his tent beside a Terebinth tree. It was not until half a century after Mohammed's death, that the non-exclusive community of "believers" that he had founded was transformed into Islam, "submission" , by Abd al Malek the Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. Just as the Byzantine emperors had felt the need to stamp out different versions of Christianity and impose an orthodoxy on all their subjects, and just as the Rabbis of the Talmud labored to define minutely every aspect of Jewish life, so the leader of the first Arab empire needed to establish a defining central orthodoxy for his huge and diverse realm. That orthodoxy was Islam, a religion exclusively for the Arab conquerors, whose holy language was Arabic, and whose geographical origins were deep in Arabia.

The book eventually achieves its objective - but the road is long and winding. Some examples: The third chapter "New Rome" - although harking back to the origins of Rome - is essentially a narrative about Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. How is it possible to get 28 pages into such a narrative before the word "Christian" occurs? Apparently - as far as the story so far is concerned - Constantine's only significant achievement was moving the seat of empire to Byzantium. Then there are pages of panegyrics about Justinian's efforts to codify Roman law, but nothing about his ecclesiastical policies or his success in recapturing the lands of the western empire overrun by the barbarians in the previous century. The next section of this chapter swoops back in time to recap the growth of Christianity, Constantine's role in its establishment as the religion of the Roman state, and eventually Justinian too. Judaism gets a similar switchback treatment; starting with the Talmudic academies in 6th century Babylon, we flash back to Edessa where Jewish and Christian identities were being fought over in the 3rd century, and finally - in a chapter entitled "The Children of Abraham", which leads with six pages on Christian monastics and pilgrims - we get a potted history of the Jews from the time of Abraham up to the "present". i.e. 6th century Palestine.

The scholarship, in as much as I am qualified to judge it, is impeccable. The voluminous chapter notes are evidence of the thoroughness of Holland's research and the comprehensiveness of his sources. His reference to the marginal role of the rabbis until the 6th century, when they firmly established themselves as the leaders of the community and teachers of Jewish Law, is an example of how his narrative reflects recent state-of-the-art scholarship. His sources on Islam seem to include the most recent critical studies by Ibn Warraq and Fred Donner and others I am not familiar with.

The problem is Tom Holland's style; you never know quite where he is going. The narrative's swerves and switchbacks occur quite stealthily; in each chapter there is always a crucial turning point, which leads to his plot objective; you find yourself doing a backward search in an effort to find out how you got to where you are. The other book of his that I have read (Millenium/ The Forge of Christendom), starts at the end of the "story" with the dramatic meeting between the German emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory at Canossa. There it worked, because in a way the whole book is about the efforts of the Catholic Church to achieve its independence from emperors. In the present book I feel it works to the detriment of the narrative. The other distraction in the present book is the way he switches from a sweeping historical perspective to minute - and often prurient - details, like the halitosis of Abd al-Malek or the sexual antics of the empress Theodora before she got religion and married Justinian. Perhaps he really is trying to appeal to an audience that doesn't normally read "real" history, and would not swallow a straightforward chronological narrative - good luck with that.

The reviews that precede me are thorough and point out both the strengths and weaknesses of *The Shadow of the Sword*. I am largely in agreement with their comments. I *do,* however, disagree with the claim that this is poorly written. To the contrary, the writing is elegant and flows rapidly: in the parts of the history that I was acquainted with, I could consume whole pages in seconds.

The problem arises precisely from Holland's fluent prose: as he reconstructs events, his eloquent descriptions can deceive the reader into taking his formulations literally, rather than being what they are--literary reconstructions. It reminded me of a newspaper: if it misrepresents the facts that I *know* about, how can I trust those assertions that I do *not* have personal knowledge about? I want to be clear: I am not accusing Mr. Holland of historical errors. The problem is that he writes so well that the reader can be tempted to take his descriptions at face value.

Here's an example, literally at random (Kindle Loc 3333): "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, out through the olive groves that stretched southwards of the city, 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." There are 3 facts in those sentences: that Simeon became a stylite in 527, he was a child at the time, and that he came from Antioch. Everything else is in Holland's very vivid imagination.

Much in this work I already knew about: the Jewish and Christian history, and the contemporary skeptical reconstructions of Islamic origins and history. Unfortunately, when he poses the crucial questions about Islamic origins (ch. 6, "More Questions that Answers,"--"When?" [Loc 5030], "Where?" [Loc 5423] "Why?" [Loc 5779]), his answers are obscure. His answer to "Where?" was especially disappointing, since it is a question I myself have thought about a good bit. I was hoping he would give a clear, even if tentative, answer.

The Persian history was for me an eye-opener. In general, Holland excels at painting a picture of the fevered apocalypticism that coursed through Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian religiosity in the sixth and seventh centuries. That, along with the fact that he brings the contemporary literature on Islamic origins into popular historiography, is probably his greatest contribution.