In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World

by Tom Holland

had set themselves to conquering the world – and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day.

Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history.

eerie figures framed by peacock feathers and crescent moons stood guard over desert lakes. The mightiest idol of all, however, and the glory of Harran itself, was a colossal statue of the city’s patron, Sin – the ‘Lord of the Moon’.

So it was that the written record of the rabbis’ learning, their talmud, was brought to testify to an apparently puzzling truth. The Torah, which the rabbis attributed to God Himself, and which they claimed had first been revealed to the Jewish people way back in the mists of time, was composed in part of their very own commentaries upon it.

Palestinian rabbis’ most trend-setting talent was for something more portentous: a rewriting of Jewish tradition so as to give themselves a starring role in it.

At Hira, for instance, there stood two stones sacred to a god named Dushara, which his worshippers would regularly make sticky with gore.83 A second deity, al-‘Uzza – the ‘Mighty Queen’ – was graced with an even more spectacular draught of blood when, in 527, Mundhir sacrificed no fewer than four hundred Christian virgins in her honour.

The bishop, however, had misheard: Dushara was not a god of a ka‘iba but of a ka’ba – a ‘cube’. The allusion was to the stone, black and uncarved, that the Nabataeans worshipped as an incarnation of the god, somewhere in a shrine to the south of the Dead Sea.

Mundhir, following his capture of one of Arethas’ sons, did not hesitate to top his earlier sacrifice of four hundred virgins to al-‘Uzza by offering up the Ghassanid prince to the goddess al-‘Uzza.

Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an.

Given that the Prophet’s earliest biographers were writing almost two centuries after his death, how far can we legitimately accept their presumption that seventh-century Mecca was genuinely a place of great significance and wealth – the ‘Mother of Cities’?

A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca – on his doorstep though it effectively was.

Four decades on from their discovery, however, these precious manuscripts remain shrouded in mystery. Only two researchers, both German, have been permitted to study them. When one of these, an expert in Arabic palaeography by the name of Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, publicly asserted that the fragments demonstrated that the Qur’an, no less than the Bible, had evolved over time and was a veritable ‘cocktail of texts’,20 the Yemeni authorities reacted with fury. To this day, the Qur’anic fragments in Sana’a remain unpublished – nor have any further Western scholars been permitted to study them. As a result, their true significance remains opaque.

Unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers – from Cyrus to Augustus – the Qur’an betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics.

of all those emperors, bishops and saints who, over the centuries, had struggled with such passion and such earnestness to arrive at a consensus as to the nature of Christ – of these, in the Qur’an, there is not so much as a hint.

And yet, in every register of the age, there is one intriguing absence. As with Mecca, the city in which the Prophet supposedly grew up, so with the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad supposedly belonged – all is deafening silence.

In fact, there is precious little evidence that Mu’awiya paid much attention to the Prophet at all. Nowhere in his inscriptions, nor on his coins, nor in any of the documents preserved from his reign, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad.