Scepticism and Uncontested History: A Review Article

Abstract

This article critically reviews the recent film and literary contributions of Tom Holland to the field of Islamic history. In the Shadow of the Sword chiefly narrates the history of the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires in vivid prose and through contemporaneous sources. However, the text falters in its narrative of the rise of Islamic civilisation by failing to incorporate recent methodological advancements in the field of Islamic history. Holland’s film, Islam: The Untold Story , similarly ignores research that has confirmed the early stabilisation of the text of the Qur’an as well as seventh-century Muslim and non-Muslim sources that discuss the early community. This article argues that the collective memory of mutually antagonistic sub-communities may also provide information about important public events in history. Methodologies that ignore Muslim literature to understand Islamic history are characterised as affirming early Orientalist assumptions that their Muslim subjects were culturally and intellectually impoverished. Theories that portray the Prophet Muhammad as incapable of independently producing the Qur’an in Mecca are dismissed as implausible in light of the collective memory of rival Muslim informants and conceptions of the sacred.