The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids acquired through violence the vast empire of the Umayyads, stretching from the Loire to the Hindu Kush, and founded Baghdad. The title of Tom Holland’s book is rather studiously general, but his central topic is unmistakable: the founding and establishment of Islam and its political and martial setting.
If Holland didn’t want to make a point of this in his title, one couldn’t blame him. The traditional account of the first days of Islam, the revelation of the Qu’ran to the Prophet Mohammed from 610, the unbroken line of authentic hadiths, or sayings, from the Prophet’s time to this, the details of the Prophet’s autobiography — all these are still strenuously upheld by most Islamic scholars.
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