Islam: The Untold Story

[poliphilo]

What do we know about the origins of Islam? Almost nothing. The historical record is a blank. We have the Koran and that's it. No-one, including the Arabs, had anything to say about Mohammed until sixty years after his death, by which time the Arabs had acquired a huge empire at the expense of the Romans and the Persians. Subjects of the new Empire weren't clear about the religion of their rulers, but thought it was a kind of Judaism. 

This absence of evidence has led some historians to speculate that the Arab armies weren't Muslim at all- that they were on a conquering mission, not a religious one- and it was only later, once they'd got their feet under the table, that they saw the need for an new, distinctive ideology to validate their empire and prop it up. That's when they discovered they'd once had a prophet of their own.  As for Mohammed himself, internal evidence suggests he composed the Koran in a fertile area close to the Dead Sea, a long way away from Mecca. His mythos got itself relocated there because (for chauvinistic reasons) the Arabs needed to associate him with their heartland. 

If you'd like to experience this material cut with a lot of entertaining ancient history read Tom Holland's book In The Shadow of the Sword; some critics have compared it to Gibbon. If you have 95 minutes to spare you might want to watch the TV film in which the same material is cut with a lot of footage of Holland wandering round the Middle East looking haunted. 

Comments

[wolfshift.livejournal.com]

My understanding of the spread of Islam is that it was exclusively a conquering mission, that originally they didn't want to let non-Arabs into the religion at all, and only later---when they discovered some political advantage in doing so---did they allow others to join. I don't remember whether I got that from a "traditional" Muslim source or a Western academic one, though I'm thinking it might be in Karen Armstrong's book, "Islam: A Short History". It wouldn't contradict Muslim tradition, so far as I know.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Muslim tradition is all we have to go on for the early history of Islam. Whether we accept it or not is, I suppose, a matter of faith and/or temperament.