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

by Tom Holland

Prototype of every subsequent Islamic empire that it certainly was, the Caliphate founded in the seventh century was also something very much more: the last, the climactic, and the most enduring empire of antiquity. Such is the claim that this book aims to prove.

“Religion, in God’s eyes,” so it declared, “is Islam.”

Which said, the proofs of Muslim conquests were a simple enough matter for anyone in Damascus to track down. Leave behind the courtyard of Walid’s mosque, with its gleaming marble and delicately ornamented fountains, and there in the city’s markets, penned amid their own filth and misery, were to be found human cattle corralled from every corner of the world. The stories told of Spain might have been conjured from a realm of fantasy—but not so the coffle of thirty thousand prisoners brought back to Syria by the conquerors of the Visigoths. Nothing had served more violently to rub the noses of the vanquished in the brute fact of the Arabs’ might than the depredations of their slavers.

Nor dread alone—spluttering indignation as well. “Our slaves are rebelling against us!” So the warlords of Kufa had exclaimed in outrage. “But they are our booty—granted us by God!”48

The jumble of beliefs and doctrines carried by bands of overwhelmingly illiterate warriors from the desert had been transformed, over the course of barely a century, into a religion of lawyers.