Heaven help the historian who dares to suggest that Islam might be a product of earlier religions and not, as the faithful insist, a revelation direct from God. Tom Holland has done exactly this in his brilliantly provocative new book "In the Shadow of the Sword".
The problem with the life of Muhammad is that there is almost no textual support for it until almost two centuries after his death. Holland is not going so far as to say that he never existed. Just that the account we have comes from the 800s, by which time Haroun al-Rashid was caliph over an empire that stretched from China to the Atlantic, and the 1,001 Nights was being compiled. The veracity of details and perhaps also some of the more important moments of the prophet's life were – are – impossible to prove.
The same goes for the Qur'an. There is no written mention of it in the period immediately following Muhammad – nor any commentary on it until the eighth century. Holland does not, perhaps, give enough weight to the value of oral tradition, the route by which the Qur'an is said to have been received (Muhammad is widely held to have been illiterate) and initially preserved.
But his investigation does turn up some exciting possibilities as to the origin of the text and also to the location of Mecca: Holland points out that "there is not a shred of backing" in the Qur'an for locating Mecca in the Hijaz. The first text-based claim for its location in what we now know as Mecca, written a century or so after the revelation of the Qur'an, was a preposition "taken wholly for granted". He might be right, he might be wrong, but there is no denying that the challenge is both stimulating and, in a world of increasingly rigid Muslim dogma, refreshing.
The lives of some people who have dared to question the history of the prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an have been ruined, even ended. We must hope that Holland is spared their wrath and that his excellent book will be lauded, as it should be, for doing what the best sort of books can do – examining holy cows.
