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In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Birth Of Islam And The Rise Of The Global Arab Empire (2012)

by Tom Holland(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0385531354 (ISBN13: 9780385531351)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Doubleday

review 1: This book is an elegantly written and vivid popular history of the then nascent religions of Islam and Christianity during late antiquity. Its great strength is that it seeks to place these two faiths in their proper historical and psychological context. The Zoroastrian, Jewish and Pagan roots of many of the practices of the two religions are explored thoroughly and woven into a narrative which covers a daunting sweep of history - approximately from the time of Constantine to the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate. It analyses how Mowbeds, Rabbis, Bishops and Imams used law, hadith and ecumenical councils to isolate the faithful like stylites on top of columns of orthodoxy, in a world where ideas and religions had once mingled and merged. This iconoclasm is particularly directe... mored at later Muslim scholars separated by a few generations from Muhammed, who the author suggests fabricated many of the hadiths - phrases attributed to the prophet by tradition which eventually coalesced into a body of law known as the Sunna - to support their own political or moralistic agendas. This has naturally been considered contentious by some critics, and leads on to some of the weaker elements of the book.The key area in which the book is lacking is that it does not analyse or emphasise the provisional nature of our knowledge about late antiquity, an occasional note to suggest that there are alternative interpretations of a piece of evidence or an event would not hinder the broad argument which the author wishes to make. This is part of a wider lack of detail, which only touches upon what must have been important aspects in the story, such as the decline of the Roman Empire in the West and the mysterious heretical sects which rose and fell during that time. This is partly a result of the book's ambitious scope and perhaps also a desire to keep the pacing right for a popular history.On balance though this book was very enjoyable, informative and stylishly written It provided a good overview of an important pivot of world history, as well as a sensitive insight into the minds of the mystics and saints who refined and influenced a new kind of religion in Europe and the near East.
review 2: Awesome... If the prospect of 350 pages on the nature of the ebb and flow of the persian and roman empires in the near east in late antiquity (alone) floats your boat (it floats my boat). Also a surprise was how late the origin of the Torah was (it was passed down orally for centuries before being written down) and sheer number of Christian sects at the start was an eyeopener, as was the way they were declared heretical (Nicea). The book is actually mostly about the political landscape into which the Arab empire was born. Some people found this a distraction, but actually, it is key in understanding why the Arab empire evolved the way it did. It also shows just how much of what is now regarded as "Islamic" actually has origins more ancient than that religion. Casting a gimlet eye on the origins of Islam, it makes the sanctity with which a lot of that scripture is looked nowadays as threadbare as it really is. less

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