The Birth of Islam, has Holland got it right?
ForumHistory: On learning from and writing history
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1DinadansFriend
I just finished Tom Holland's In the shadow of the Sword. It seems a lively read, but to what extent has he been misleading, or ill-informed. It didn't find much to quarrel with in his treatment of late Antique romaness, and was grateful for the quick trot through Zoroastrianism, a culture not well served in English, but what about his view of Islam? To what degree do people think it's a hatchet job, or a reasoned critique?
2stellarexplorer
I read the introduction over the weekend; it's on my TBR, likely to get to it in the next month or two. I'm in the middle of a whirlwind of Late Antiquity/early Middle Ages study at the moment, into which Holland's book seems to fit.
3Muscogulus
>1 DinadansFriend: In the shadow of the sword
What's his thesis? The title makes me skeptical, as it seems to repeat a European prejudice that Islam is a "religion of the sword" that won converts mainly by death threats. Historians of Islamic empires — the ones who actually base their work on primary sources — reject that narrative as simplistic, with the qualified exception of Bernard Lewis, who's better known for his sermonizing about what's wrong with the Mideast today than for his historical scholarship, which is considerable. But I think even Lewis would criticize the idea of Islam having been spread by the sword.
To be clear: Islamic empires certainly had swords and used them, and they imposed their dominion on non-Muslims. But they did not normally impose their religion. (To get more specific than that, one has to get into specific historical contexts.)
But it's probably safe to assume Holland's thesis is not rehashed crusader history (although there's always a market for that). He may be making a point about how the 8th & 9th century army shaped the Umayyad state, and Arab army camps on conquered soil became the nuclei of major cities (such as Cairo, Egypt). Patronage by a sword-bearing Arab was the key to advancement in the Umayyad state, as I understand it, though you didn't have to be Muslim to receive it. Military institutions remained influential throughout medieval and early modern Arab history, it's safe to say, but not in the same way as in Europe. For instance there is the Mamluk slave soldiery who eventually took over Egypt — still elite slaves, apparently, even after they came to run the state. I've never understood how that worked and would like to read about it.
What's his thesis? The title makes me skeptical, as it seems to repeat a European prejudice that Islam is a "religion of the sword" that won converts mainly by death threats. Historians of Islamic empires — the ones who actually base their work on primary sources — reject that narrative as simplistic, with the qualified exception of Bernard Lewis, who's better known for his sermonizing about what's wrong with the Mideast today than for his historical scholarship, which is considerable. But I think even Lewis would criticize the idea of Islam having been spread by the sword.
To be clear: Islamic empires certainly had swords and used them, and they imposed their dominion on non-Muslims. But they did not normally impose their religion. (To get more specific than that, one has to get into specific historical contexts.)
But it's probably safe to assume Holland's thesis is not rehashed crusader history (although there's always a market for that). He may be making a point about how the 8th & 9th century army shaped the Umayyad state, and Arab army camps on conquered soil became the nuclei of major cities (such as Cairo, Egypt). Patronage by a sword-bearing Arab was the key to advancement in the Umayyad state, as I understand it, though you didn't have to be Muslim to receive it. Military institutions remained influential throughout medieval and early modern Arab history, it's safe to say, but not in the same way as in Europe. For instance there is the Mamluk slave soldiery who eventually took over Egypt — still elite slaves, apparently, even after they came to run the state. I've never understood how that worked and would like to read about it.
4Muscogulus
>1 DinadansFriend:
To what degree do people think it's a hatchet job, or a reasoned critique?
According to Glenn Bowerstock in The Guardian, the book is irresponsible but would have to step up its game to rate even as a hatchet job.
From the review:
He's particularly contemptuous of Holland's naive folk etymologies of Arabic words and names. For example:
T'Allah assee — get it? Huh? Get it?
To what degree do people think it's a hatchet job, or a reasoned critique?
According to Glenn Bowerstock in The Guardian, the book is irresponsible but would have to step up its game to rate even as a hatchet job.
From the review:
Holland came to his work on Islam unencumbered by any prior acquaintance with its fundamental texts or the scholarly literature. He modestly compares himself to Edward Gibbon, whom he can call without the slightest fear of contradiction "an infinitely greater historian than myself". In the Decline and Fall, at the opening of his magisterial chapter 50 on Muhammad, Gibbon had candidly acknowledged his ignorance of "Oriental tongues", but he also expressed his gratitude "to the learned interpreters who have transfused their science in the Latin, French, and English languages". Holland seems to have confined himself largely to interpreters, learned or otherwise, writing in English, but his efforts to inform himself, arduous as they may have been, were manifestly insufficient.Bowerstock goes on to show how Holland assumes an iconoclastic pose while remaining ignorant of "many of the most important recent discoveries" of manuscripts from pre-Islamic Arabia. Holland "hints darkly at censorship" that is supposedly suppressing early manuscripts; Bowerstock isn't buying it.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). Although that work was depressingly misguided in replacing biblical places with their homonyms in the Arabian peninsula, it at least revealed an accomplished scholar who had gone badly astray. Holland has read widely, but carelessly.
He's particularly contemptuous of Holland's naive folk etymologies of Arabic words and names. For example:
{Holland} proposes that {Muhammad's} own Meccan tribe, the Quraysh, took its name from the Syriac word qarisha, which, according to Holland, would have been "duly Arabised". This jaw-dropping idea depends on Holland's mistaken view that the Syriac word could allude to a confederation. What it means is to clot or congeal.Other scholars have won notoriety in recent years by drawing on Syriac or Aramaic to cook up alternate meanings for words in the Qur'an, turning fair-skinned maidens into white raisins, for instance. To me, this makes about as much sense as reading Beowulf as if it had been written in Old Norse rather than Old English. Nevertheless, this stuff pays the bills for a half dozen or so minor celebrity scholars. As Bowerstock remarks, this stuff is "catnip" for Tom Holland. It reminds me of the Cherokee Muslim I encountered online who insists that Arab Muslims were in America a long, long time ago and left their mark on Native American culture, as one can see by looking at place names like Tallahassee.
T'Allah assee — get it? Huh? Get it?
5DinadansFriend
>4 Muscogulus::
Holland's thesis is that the revelation made by Mohammed was different than the version presented to the Muslims by the efforts of the First Abbasid Calif. He believes that there was more apocalyptic and revelatory Arabic literature than that later attributed to Mohammed, and that a certain amount of mix-and-match was played in order to come up with a standard version suitable for the further progress of the Faith. He doesn't think that the hadith are anything but amendments proposed later to bring Islam into a form that could be used to serve the needs of a more urbanized and sophisticated laity.
He has some evidence that Mecca wasn't the initial site for a holy city, and the Umayyids put a lot of effort into preparing Jerusalem for that role. The Dome of the Rock being started before we have much evidence about the site in Mecca. Holland's site would be somewhere between Petra and Medina, as several early mosques are orientated to such a location.
So I'm curious as to whether there is some other material dedicated to an exploration of Early Islam?
That was definitely terrible etymology even about a town that gets no respect on other fronts.
Holland's thesis is that the revelation made by Mohammed was different than the version presented to the Muslims by the efforts of the First Abbasid Calif. He believes that there was more apocalyptic and revelatory Arabic literature than that later attributed to Mohammed, and that a certain amount of mix-and-match was played in order to come up with a standard version suitable for the further progress of the Faith. He doesn't think that the hadith are anything but amendments proposed later to bring Islam into a form that could be used to serve the needs of a more urbanized and sophisticated laity.
He has some evidence that Mecca wasn't the initial site for a holy city, and the Umayyids put a lot of effort into preparing Jerusalem for that role. The Dome of the Rock being started before we have much evidence about the site in Mecca. Holland's site would be somewhere between Petra and Medina, as several early mosques are orientated to such a location.
So I'm curious as to whether there is some other material dedicated to an exploration of Early Islam?
That was definitely terrible etymology even about a town that gets no respect on other fronts.
6Rood
The history of Islam's Qur'an and the hadiths are undoubtedly much like the history of Judaism's Holy Books: an accretion of myths designed to promote and validate a group's place in the world. Much of what was written (made-up, some believe) didn't appear until a millennium or more after the reported events.
To take one simple instance: Abraham, The Father of Nations, didn't even get his name until the era of the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 BCE) ... a thousand years or more after his putative life. Almost every word written about "Abram" dates from the era of the Captivity.
The histories of organized religions tend to be largely a matter of skullduggeries put into print, where they mainly serve to subjugate people, generation after generation.
To take one simple instance: Abraham, The Father of Nations, didn't even get his name until the era of the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 BCE) ... a thousand years or more after his putative life. Almost every word written about "Abram" dates from the era of the Captivity.
The histories of organized religions tend to be largely a matter of skullduggeries put into print, where they mainly serve to subjugate people, generation after generation.
7Muscogulus
>5 DinadansFriend:
that the revelation made by Mohammed was different than the version presented to the Muslims by the efforts of the First Abbasid Calif. He believes that there was more apocalyptic and revelatory Arabic literature than that later attributed to Mohammed, and that a certain amount of mix-and-match was played in order to come up with a standard version
Yeah, this resembles the arguments of Patricia Crone and others — the stuff that Bowerstock calls "catnip" for Tom Holland. I'm a Muslim but not a book worshipper, and I'm a fan of textual criticism of any scripture. At the same time, I understand the irritation of Muslim scholars who watch Crone and her colleagues waltz into Quran studies with an orientalist attitude of beginning real criticism of the Quran for the first time. By contrast, when Amina Wadud, an American Muslim scholar, assails gender bias in the interpretation of the Quran by Muslim male scholars, she draws on not just her own reading of the text, but also pre-modern Islamic scholarship to back up her analysis (Review of Qur'an and Woman).
Christian or atheist scholars of the Old Testament don’t simply disregard Jewish scholarly treatment of the Torah. (Well, some anti-Semitic scholars have done so.) Islamic scholarship has yet to earn the same respect, at least from the best known and most popular of the Western Quran scholars. A pretty good survey of the field is in this 1999 Atlantic Monthly article.
that the hadith are … amendments proposed later to bring Islam into a form that could be used to serve the needs of a more urbanized and sophisticated laity.
Does he deal with the contradictory content of some hadiths?* It's hard to sustain a theory of a central committee revising the content of the hadiths. It's true that no hadiths were preserved until long after Muhammad's death, and Muhammad actually discouraged the preserving of stories about him. The orthodox explanation for the hadiths is that Muhammad's conduct had been the model of correctness when he lived, so a record of it was needed when he died, for guidance on matters the Quran does not specifically address. Each hadith was recorded with a chain of attribution (e.g., Sharik bin ‘Abdullah bin Abi Namir heard Anas bin Malik heard Abu Hurairah say, "The Prophet told me…"). Shorter chains are better, of course, and hadiths that accord with other hadiths strengthen each other. It's a very systematic way to approach the preservation of oral tradition, and it includes some unflattering stories about Muhammad, including the "satanic verses" story that is the source of the title of Salman Rushdie's novel. If true, the story would undermine the foundations of the religion. Of course the story was judged incredible, and it rests on only one relatively weak source. But it was preserved anyway. This doesn’t prove that other potential hadiths haven't been suppressed (it's impossible to prove a negative concerning oral tradition from more than a thousand years ago) but it provides circumstantial evidence at least that the process of collecting hadiths could be rigorous and detached.
* Hadith = "story"; preserved oral tradition about the life of Muhammad
The real problem with hadiths, in my view, is their copiousness and the tendency of some Muslims (such as the Wahhabi editors of the Noble Qur'an translation) to cherry-pick hadiths that reinforce their preferred beliefs. For reactionaries, there's a strong temptation to pick out stories of 7th-century social norms and enshrine these as laws for how to live life in the 21st century. This is why some of the most forbidding Islamists call themselves ahl as-sunnah, in effect, people of the hadiths. (The hadiths collectively describe the customs (sunnah) of Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims.)
I've also heard/read Muslim scholars acknowledge without controversy that many of the more homiletic hadiths very likely preserve older sayings by putting them in the mouth of Muhammad. He probably did say them at some point in his life, but he probably wasn’t the first. These would be sayings along the lines of "Trust in God, but tie your camel."
He has some evidence that Mecca wasn't the initial site for a holy city, and the Umayyids put a lot of effort into preparing Jerusalem for that role.
I think this is from the 1978 book Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. It has been attacked by secular as well as religious scholars, and according to the Atlantic article, even the authors have since retreated from some of their claims. Crone continues to dispute the historical claim that Mecca was a spice trading center; hence she rejects the tradition that Muhammad's preaching was in part a response to the decline of morals and social cohesion among the Meccans. But Tom Holland's theory that Muhammad actually came from somewhere in "Jordan" is pseudohistory.
As for Jerusalem, if the Umayyads wanted to make it the holy city of Islam, what was stopping them? They controlled Jerusalem from the beginning of their dynasty to the end (661-750), and their Abbasid successors kept it until 1099.
that the revelation made by Mohammed was different than the version presented to the Muslims by the efforts of the First Abbasid Calif. He believes that there was more apocalyptic and revelatory Arabic literature than that later attributed to Mohammed, and that a certain amount of mix-and-match was played in order to come up with a standard version
Yeah, this resembles the arguments of Patricia Crone and others — the stuff that Bowerstock calls "catnip" for Tom Holland. I'm a Muslim but not a book worshipper, and I'm a fan of textual criticism of any scripture. At the same time, I understand the irritation of Muslim scholars who watch Crone and her colleagues waltz into Quran studies with an orientalist attitude of beginning real criticism of the Quran for the first time. By contrast, when Amina Wadud, an American Muslim scholar, assails gender bias in the interpretation of the Quran by Muslim male scholars, she draws on not just her own reading of the text, but also pre-modern Islamic scholarship to back up her analysis (Review of Qur'an and Woman).
Christian or atheist scholars of the Old Testament don’t simply disregard Jewish scholarly treatment of the Torah. (Well, some anti-Semitic scholars have done so.) Islamic scholarship has yet to earn the same respect, at least from the best known and most popular of the Western Quran scholars. A pretty good survey of the field is in this 1999 Atlantic Monthly article.
that the hadith are … amendments proposed later to bring Islam into a form that could be used to serve the needs of a more urbanized and sophisticated laity.
Does he deal with the contradictory content of some hadiths?* It's hard to sustain a theory of a central committee revising the content of the hadiths. It's true that no hadiths were preserved until long after Muhammad's death, and Muhammad actually discouraged the preserving of stories about him. The orthodox explanation for the hadiths is that Muhammad's conduct had been the model of correctness when he lived, so a record of it was needed when he died, for guidance on matters the Quran does not specifically address. Each hadith was recorded with a chain of attribution (e.g., Sharik bin ‘Abdullah bin Abi Namir heard Anas bin Malik heard Abu Hurairah say, "The Prophet told me…"). Shorter chains are better, of course, and hadiths that accord with other hadiths strengthen each other. It's a very systematic way to approach the preservation of oral tradition, and it includes some unflattering stories about Muhammad, including the "satanic verses" story that is the source of the title of Salman Rushdie's novel. If true, the story would undermine the foundations of the religion. Of course the story was judged incredible, and it rests on only one relatively weak source. But it was preserved anyway. This doesn’t prove that other potential hadiths haven't been suppressed (it's impossible to prove a negative concerning oral tradition from more than a thousand years ago) but it provides circumstantial evidence at least that the process of collecting hadiths could be rigorous and detached.
* Hadith = "story"; preserved oral tradition about the life of Muhammad
The real problem with hadiths, in my view, is their copiousness and the tendency of some Muslims (such as the Wahhabi editors of the Noble Qur'an translation) to cherry-pick hadiths that reinforce their preferred beliefs. For reactionaries, there's a strong temptation to pick out stories of 7th-century social norms and enshrine these as laws for how to live life in the 21st century. This is why some of the most forbidding Islamists call themselves ahl as-sunnah, in effect, people of the hadiths. (The hadiths collectively describe the customs (sunnah) of Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims.)
I've also heard/read Muslim scholars acknowledge without controversy that many of the more homiletic hadiths very likely preserve older sayings by putting them in the mouth of Muhammad. He probably did say them at some point in his life, but he probably wasn’t the first. These would be sayings along the lines of "Trust in God, but tie your camel."
He has some evidence that Mecca wasn't the initial site for a holy city, and the Umayyids put a lot of effort into preparing Jerusalem for that role.
I think this is from the 1978 book Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. It has been attacked by secular as well as religious scholars, and according to the Atlantic article, even the authors have since retreated from some of their claims. Crone continues to dispute the historical claim that Mecca was a spice trading center; hence she rejects the tradition that Muhammad's preaching was in part a response to the decline of morals and social cohesion among the Meccans. But Tom Holland's theory that Muhammad actually came from somewhere in "Jordan" is pseudohistory.
As for Jerusalem, if the Umayyads wanted to make it the holy city of Islam, what was stopping them? They controlled Jerusalem from the beginning of their dynasty to the end (661-750), and their Abbasid successors kept it until 1099.
8SusannahW
Have not read Holland yet, but I have to say that Islam is NOT a religion. It is a political philosophy masquerading as a religion. See www gates of vienna dot net to see what the "cultural enrichers" are doing to Europe. It is a real travesty - and what is the Muslim world doing? Nothing. Nada. Less, than 1,000 "so called" refugees have been taken in - 80% of these refugees are male of military age and Christians fear for their lives. Also Muslim women who if they do flee are only in fear of being raped more frequently.
9SusannahW
I have not read Holland yet, but it is not a prejudice - the reality is that Islam has only a few alternatives for those who are not Muslim: you can convert to Islam, pay a huge fine every year, or you can die (or if you are really lucky you can flee). That's it. So it is pretty clear that it is is a "religion of the sword."
I have read Lewis however, and there is nothing wrong with his historical scholarship (I know, I am a historian in a different field.) If Lewis denies Islam has been spread by the sword, then I'm missing something. It clearly has been spread by the sword - it is part and parcel of Islam. The problem is not Muslims, it is Islam. The sooner you and others realize that the better.
I have read Lewis however, and there is nothing wrong with his historical scholarship (I know, I am a historian in a different field.) If Lewis denies Islam has been spread by the sword, then I'm missing something. It clearly has been spread by the sword - it is part and parcel of Islam. The problem is not Muslims, it is Islam. The sooner you and others realize that the better.
10Muscogulus
>6 Rood:
The histories of organized religions tend to be largely a matter of skullduggeries put into print, where they mainly serve to subjugate people, generation after generation.
That's a popular perspective, but reductionist. It's similar to statements such as "all property is theft" or "the state is a velvet glove on an iron fist." These are statements that cannot be falsified. In other words, they are like religious creeds.
I was an outspoken atheist in college and after, largely thanks to reading Bertrand Russell on religion. But Russell also instilled in me the principle that one should seek out conversation and debate with people one disagrees with; otherwise, well-founded beliefs decay into dogmas. Another favorable consequence is that it becomes almost impossible to dehumanize people who disagree with you. (ADD: This is not an accusation! Hope it didn't read like one.)
I've finally realized that religion is neither a tool of oppression nor of liberation. It's a battleground, contested terrain, a setting for struggle, like just about any area of human activity. I'm not entirely satisfied with the military metaphor; hence the broader term "struggle" (or in Arabic, of course, jihad).
I think that whenever we step onto any field with the conviction that every neck must bow to The Truth, we are making that particular field a little more brutal. Often we justify this kind of behavior by projecting it onto an adversary, then claiming that we are only defending ourselves.
The histories of organized religions tend to be largely a matter of skullduggeries put into print, where they mainly serve to subjugate people, generation after generation.
That's a popular perspective, but reductionist. It's similar to statements such as "all property is theft" or "the state is a velvet glove on an iron fist." These are statements that cannot be falsified. In other words, they are like religious creeds.
I was an outspoken atheist in college and after, largely thanks to reading Bertrand Russell on religion. But Russell also instilled in me the principle that one should seek out conversation and debate with people one disagrees with; otherwise, well-founded beliefs decay into dogmas. Another favorable consequence is that it becomes almost impossible to dehumanize people who disagree with you. (ADD: This is not an accusation! Hope it didn't read like one.)
I've finally realized that religion is neither a tool of oppression nor of liberation. It's a battleground, contested terrain, a setting for struggle, like just about any area of human activity. I'm not entirely satisfied with the military metaphor; hence the broader term "struggle" (or in Arabic, of course, jihad).
I think that whenever we step onto any field with the conviction that every neck must bow to The Truth, we are making that particular field a little more brutal. Often we justify this kind of behavior by projecting it onto an adversary, then claiming that we are only defending ourselves.
11Muscogulus
>8 SusannahW:
It is a real travesty - and what is the Muslim world doing? Nothing. Nada. Less, than 1,000 "so called" refugees have been taken in
This map is from August 2014, when the refugee population that had fled Syria was 3 million. It is now more than 4 million.
Susannah, I suppose you will find some way to dismiss this information, but I didn't want others to be confused. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is a more credible source than some guy's blog about the Muslim menace.
I'm familiar with gatesofvienna.net. It's one of countless depressingly similar anti-Muslim sites that echo one another. FWIW I'm also familiar with the actual city of Vienna; I lived there as a student of German language and history. The gates were torn down in the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Ring_Road
It is a real travesty - and what is the Muslim world doing? Nothing. Nada. Less, than 1,000 "so called" refugees have been taken in
This map is from August 2014, when the refugee population that had fled Syria was 3 million. It is now more than 4 million.
Susannah, I suppose you will find some way to dismiss this information, but I didn't want others to be confused. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is a more credible source than some guy's blog about the Muslim menace.
I'm familiar with gatesofvienna.net. It's one of countless depressingly similar anti-Muslim sites that echo one another. FWIW I'm also familiar with the actual city of Vienna; I lived there as a student of German language and history. The gates were torn down in the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Ring_Road
