Muslim myths?

I am currently reading ‘The Forge of Christendom’, which is Tom Holland’s sequel to ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’. It deals with the so-called Dark Ages when in fact Christendom surpassed Islam. This is a whole chapter of which I am totally ignorant, dealing with a period of European history that in fact disproved the title of the age. I had not known that the last Roman Emperor, Augustus (a Saxon) died in 1000. By the end of the century when the book finishes, Islam had been driven from many of its former conquests. Christianity had by this time spread across the whole of Europe.

Neither did I know that in the early days of what became the Ottoman Empire the bureaucracy was Christian.

Book reviewers are an odd lot. I wonder if they have been infected by the current morbid effect of Islamophobia? Charles Moore in the DT, who is normally very sound, treats the book as if it is an expose of the faults and contradictions in the Qur’an, doubts about the history of Mohammed,  and a dismissal of Mecca being a holy city. The Sunday Times recommended soft-backs describes it briefly in similar terms.

In fact, the book is about the disintegration of ancient empires and it is not until page 367 that we come to the forging of Islam, a chapter of a mere 65 pages in a volume of 526 pages. Most of the stuff about the rise of the Arab empire is outwith his analysis of Mohammedanism.

He does cast doubt on the origins of the Qur’an, suggesting that far from having been handed down entire direct from God to Mohammed, it was compiled by scholars for collections of fragments, and in fact until modern times there were no less than 7 versions. There was a huge find of fragments in modern times, in Yemen, which, after an initial study, was suppressed.

We know, of course, that the Gospels were edited from substantial source material and it is possible that the same was true of the Qur’an.

Some of what is taken to be Islamic law is lifted from the Torah. For example, stoning to death of a woman taken in adultery is prescribed in the Torah but not in the Qur’an, which prescribes whipping. I get the impression that much of what we find objectionable about Islam is not sanctioned by the Qur’an at all, in the same way

And it is particularly interesting that both Arabs and Jews claim to be direct descendants of Abraham.

He avers that Mecca was unlikely to be the holy city because in Mohammed’s day it amounted to very little. And the first biography of Mohammed was not written until about 200 years after his death. On the other hand there is far more verifiable detail about the fact of Mohammed’s existence than there is about Jesus.

For good measure, ‘the Promised Land’ is a religious construct. There is no historical justification for it.

Something new to me is his account of a Jewish state that existed in Arabia. It made the fatal mistake of carrying out a pogrom of Christians, the upshot of which was that they themselves were utterly destroyed by an army of Arabs, and of Christians from Ethiopia.

When he was interviewed about his book, Tom Holland was asked whether he feared the same fate as Salman Rushdie. He dismissed this silly question by saying that Muslims would simply ignore him. Certainly there is nothing that is offensive to Muslims, but much food for thought.