Interview: Tom Holland on the origins of Islam

In the fifth century BC Herodotus of Halicarnassus set out a history of hostilities between the Greeks and the Persians. For all his quirky non-sequiturs (Ethiopians’ skin is black, so must be their semen…) he fulfilled his not-so-modest objective to immortalize the deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, in particular, the reason they warred against one another. Tom Holland (who is, incidentally, in the process of translating Herodotus’ Histories) evokes more than a little of this spirit in his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword, an intrepid history of the evolution of the Arab Empire.

From Rubicon to Persian Fire and Millennium Holland has hurtled through ancient history like a runaway horse on a hippodrome. The new book, which has taken five years to complete, was apparently just the next, inevitable hurdle, ‘There was an obvious gap, having written about the Persian Empire and about the transformation from the Roman world to the Medieval world in Europe, to look at what had happened in the East — the collapse of the Persian Empire there, the truncation of the Roman Empire, and to treat the coming of Islam as the falling of the Roman Empire in the East, I thought, would be an interesting take.’