Book Review
In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
by Tom Holland
Copyright © 2012 by Tom Holland, All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. eISBN: 978-0-385-53136-8.
I was delighted at the beginning of the book seeing the ease with which Mr. Holland glides through the narrative. The opening of the book like a thriller, his mastery over the language and the smooth edges of the stories are all very delightful.
But after I came to about the half of the book I started to wonder was it not supposed to be a book on the history of Islam? Why are these mind boggling intricate details of the 4th, 5th century C.E. dynasties of Persia and Rome occupying the two thirds of the book then? I was getting impatient to get started with what the title of the book promised.
Then I became aware of the subtle indications throughout the book that tries rather to hurt the feelings of a Muslim, indications and suggestions such the Islamic source of law, the Sunnah or the Seerah, was actually the work of the newly converted Jew scholars of the famous Jew religious schools in Sura and Pumpedita in modern day Iraq and that the Hadith or the traditions that are attributed to the Prophet Muhammad SA were actually invented by the Jew scholar converts and then following their Jew system of referencing attributed those to the Prophet SA. This in addition to that the location of the Kaba, the House of Allah Sunhanahu Tayala, is not beyond controversy and may be the subject to error by an entire city, and that the Quran Majid that we have now may be not what the Prophet SA actually gave to the people, and attributing the Quran to the Prophet Sa instead of it being the words of Allah Subhanahu Tayala. In effect reducing the whole of Islam to a shadow of something that, at best, did not exist or worse created by the later Arab elites to justify their position in power.
Mr. Holland says:
"Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa—where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense—the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama."
He then cements the suggestion by stating:
"Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? It was in Kufa, at around the same time as Walid, far distant in Damascus, was building his great mosque, that Muslim scholars first began to explore a momentous proposition: that there existed, alongside the Prophet’s written revelations, other, equally binding revelations that had never before been written down. Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet’s companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. Always, however, by bringing these previously unrecorded snatches of the past—these hadiths—to light, Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish."
Note: Sura and Pumpedita are two places in Mesopotemia "on the western bank of the Euphrates", where "the rabbis of Mesopotamia, back in the time of Ardashir, had founded the famous yeshivas" or “school,” with ambitions to change the world".
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