The Origins of Islam

thank you very much thank you so much for getting our getting his early and and thank you for braving the notorious jihadi community of Rancho Mirage about which we've heard so much let's hope we pull through of course I mean there is there is indisputably a faint whiff of controversy about what I want to talk about today which essentially is to look at the origins of Islam which in a sense means the origins of the Quran as history so not in terms of what Muslims traditionally have believed but about what the historical record seems to me to tell us about how and why Islam came into existence and the reason that I'm interested in Zayed I did not have a particular interest in Islam but I did have an interest in the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam is also the story of the fall of the Roman Empire in the east of course the Roman Empire in the West including Rome Falls in the fifth century AD but in the eastern half it continues to go strong from it is ruled from the new Rome the second Rome the city founded by the first Christian Empire emperor of Rome Constantine Constantinople and although we perhaps think of this Eastern Roman Empire as Byzantium we call it the Byzantine Empire that is not what the people who lived in Constantinople called it they called it the Roman Empire they saw themselves as Roman albeit that they did it in Greek they called themselves as the romão so as well as being the heirs of Rome there's a sense in which the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century AD is the era of classical Greece as well so in the eastern Mediterranean in the sixth century AD it looks like the ancient world the Greeks the Romans vests still going strong and looking at the Fertile Crescent so towards Iraq towards Iran there also the world looks recognizably ancient because the great enemy of Rome in the 6th century AD as it had been for 300 years is a Persian Empire the Persian Empire ruled by the houses anthem it's called the Athenian Empire and this Persian Empire is self-consciously the air of the first Persian Empire the Empire of Cyrus and derailleurs and Xerxes who would fought the Greeks at Thermopylae and Salamis and that Empire in turn was raised on foundations laid by the Babylonians by the Assyrians going right the way back to Samaria to the very origins really of urban civilization in the Near East so the combination of these two great empires the Roman and the Persian still going strong in the 6th century AD it makes the world look like antiquity like the ancient world and then the traditional sense of what happens is that in the 7th century everything changes the traditional story is that a prophet emerges he preaches a new religion the Arabs erupted out of the desert they've got the Koran in one hand they've got the sword in the other those you know that image I was when hammers did they then write their camels if they were doing that and basically before you can say allahu akbar the conquered provinces of the Roman and the Persian Empire in the Middle East have been transformed into stage sets from the Arabian Nights and the Middle East have suddenly kind of overnight like switching on a light switch has become medieval it's become Muslim and I think there is always in history a kind of temptation to imagine that things do change very very rapidly and it may be that so things like the inauguration last it kind of gives you the sense that everything you know Donald Trump comes in Obama goes out everything changes but of course you know that it doesn't the continuities are in a sense far more significant than the changes and going right the way back through American history you can see that but before and after the Civil War profound changes and yet the continuities are in a sense even more significant likewise with the American Revolution the continuity I mean that's why I can talk to you in English after all and so we I think you know when you pause to think about that you recognize that and so you it seems apparent that this idea that with what people call the coming of Islam beginning of the seventh century everything changes cannot be true the process must have been a much much longer one much more protracted and complex one but if that's the case why do we have this sense so strongly that the coming of Islam changed everything that it was an absolute rupture well I think I think the answer to that essentially is the incredible potency of what Muslims have come to believe about the origin of their faith but it is really the stories that Muslims tell about how Islam came into being but provide the defining template for our understanding of this period so that even non-muslims up until about 40 or 50 years ago tended to take the traditional Muslim account of how Islam came into being for granted and the story is a very powerful one 8610 by the the Christian calendar it is said a merchant named Mohammed in a cave above a remote and arid cave at city named mecca in the depths of the Arabian desert heard something as terrifying as it was awesome the voice of an angel and that voice delivered to him direct and unmediated a revelation from God and it was the first in a whole series of revelations that would be delivered to Mohammed over the course of his lifetime and these revelations bundled together would become the Quran the holy text of this new emergent faith of Islam and to Muslims the divine origin of the Quran was manifest in the circumstances by which it came into being the fact that it had been given supernaturally was the great foundational miracle of this new faith now it is true I think but were you to read the Quran and not know this backstory it would not be immediately obvious I think that the only explanation for how it came into being was that it had been delivered by an angel um there are quite a lot of elements within the Quran that point to its emergent from pre-existent religions and cultures for instance it is full of characters from the Bible both the Jewish and the Christian Bible um Moses is mentioned hundred and thirty seven times in the Quran the Virgin Mary is featured more prominently in the Quran than she is in the New Testament it features as well a number of episodes drawn from the history of the Roman Empire and the culture of the Roman Empire it describes a story of seven Christians who go to sleep in a cave to escape the persecution wake up discover that one hundred years have gone by and the whole world has become Christian this story distorted appears in the Koran there is even a mention of Alexander the Great so I think that if you read the crime you do not know the backstory you would think this is recognizably a text that has emerged from a given place and a given time but there's a problem in following through the implications of that because of what Muslims tell us about how the crime came into being because what the key factor about the traditional account is that Muhammad received his first revelations in Mecca and Mecca stands as a fabulous remove from the world of the Roman Empire from this culture this this melting pot of Jewish and Christian and Roman traditions Mecca we are told stood in the middle of a desert and its inhabitants we are also told are pagan according to Muslim tradition there are no Jews there are no Christians in Mecca they didn't there were not communities that from which Muhammad could have picked up these stories according to the traditional Muslim account and what is more we are also told by Muslim tradition despite the fact that actually it's contradicted within the crown but we're told in Muslim tradition that Muhammad was illiterate so there was no prospect of him curling up with the Bible picking up a few stories a few references to Moses or the virgin and in fact if that's the case if if Muhammad comes of age in a city that is pagan that is a thousand kilometres from the frontier with Palestine if he is illiterate then how on earth are we to explain this text which is full of all these sophisticated cultural references except as a bonafide a miracle it would seem if we are to rely on the Muslim account of how the Koran came into being but the divine must indeed have penetrated this mortal sublunar world of ours and the parallel I think very interestingly is with what Christians believe about the coming into the world of Christ because just as it is the blood and muscle of Mary's virgin that in the opinion of Christians had nurtured the coming into the world of Christ so likewise in the opinion of Muslims was it for spreading almost prophylactic sands of Arabia which had served to preserve the Word of God over the course of its protracted delivery in a fit condition of untainted purity in other words just to sum up to make the point clear if the Muslim traditions but tell us about how the Koran came into being where Muhammad grew up what kind of city Mecca was if those are traditions are authentic then there is essentially no way of explaining the origins of the Quran except as coming from some divine entity which of course is fine if you're a Muslim but if you're not you might well say well okay no these are these are interesting stories interesting traditions where do they come from what are their origin what are they dates and this is where it gets interesting because I said that I didn't originally approach this topic as in any way a specialist in Islam and so I had assumed based on the fact that there are so many books published about the life of Muhammad about the origins of Islam that there would be an enormous amount of biographical material telling us about the life of Muhammad there is a wonderful quote from Salman Rushdie of all people where he says about Muhammad and he's comparing it to Jesus he says we know almost nothing about Jesus but with Muhammad we know everything more or less we know where he lived what his economic situation was who he fell in love with we know what his favorite food was we know how he liked to brush his teeth we know how he liked to play with children you know incredibly intimate personal details but it's the rub all this seeming wealth of biographical material dates at the earliest from about two centuries after he is supposed to have lived for Allah 8800 we start to get biographies and over the course of the next two centuries these biographies are written and rewritten and the further from Muhammad's life we go the more detailed these biographies become which is a curious fact and draws attention to the glaring lack of contemporary or even near contemporary biographical materials written by Muslims so within the lifetime of Muhammad himself and for about 170 years after you look for this source material and there is nothing there is a glaring black hole can black holes glare I guess they can now this is not to say as as some scholars have mostly in Germany because in Germany scholars like these kind of train speculations but Muhammad I think did exist there are those who say he did it but I think I think the evidence is pretty clear that he did and the evidence is not Muslim but generally Christian Christians writing about the emergence of of an Arab Empire do name-check Muhammad I mean the most tantalizing one is written in six three four which is four year that the Arabs first appear in Palestine the Roman province of Palestine conquering it to the on sort of the Arab invasions and this describes an unnamed prophet of the Saracens leading the invasion and it's this must be Mohammed but again there's a kind of puzzle here because Mohammed is meant to have died in 632 and according to Muslim tradition he does not lead the invasion of Palestine and yet here we have a contemporaneous account it seems saying that Mohammed was alive that he did lead the invasion and he's there two years after he's meant to be dead which kind of pinpoints the problem with squaring the accounts from Muhammad's lifetime with the stories that are told about him by Muslims much later on um and over the succeeding decades so over the course of the seventh century we do have histories written by monks bishops Christian chroniclers a few rabbis a few Zoroastrian priest which do allude to an enigmatic figure who may they described variously as the general the instructor or the king of the Arabs and I think we again consume that this figure is probably Mohammed but these cryptic allusions not to mention the fact that they're not being made by Muslims that they're being made by infidels again highlights this peculiar absences this absence of any Muslim references to Muhammad and it's only in 690 so that's 60 years and more after after the first in the Arab invasions of Palestine that an Arab ruler finally gets around to inscribing the prophets name on a public Monument it's the Dome of the rock on what is now Temple Mount you know the one with the great golden dome um and it's only decades after that that we start to get private inscriptions written in Arabic that mention Muhammad and I think the implication of that is that that clearly the promotion of Muhammad as a figure worthy of respect is top down it's being promoted by the kind of people who are building the Dome of the rock it's not writing up from the soil and as I say it's only in 800 that we start to get biographies written of Muhammad's that have survived into the present there must have been earlier versions of his life but they have vanished and I think it's pretty clear why they have vanished when you read the very earliest biography of Muhammad written by that survives written by a guy writing in Cairo called even his lamb he's absolutely upfront about the process of editing that he has done to write his biography and he says that things which it is disgraceful to discuss matters which would distress certain people and such reports as I have been told and not to be accepted as trustworthy all these things have I omitted so he's basically saying anything that doesn't fit his understanding of who and what Mohammed was me he's got rid of them and what that was we have no idea because it hasn't survived so here we here we have a measure of certainty we can know with confidence that by the early 9th century the precise details of what Mohammed was believed to have said and done some 200 years previously had come to provide for vast numbers of people from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China come to provide a road map that these people believed led to heaven they believed that God seized personal control of world affairs that the world had been set upon an utterly novel course but in the lifetime of Mohammed they had indeed been a drastic and utter rupture with the world that had existed before that and that therefore no explanation was needed for the origins of Islam and for the collapse before the Arab armies of the Roman and the Persian empires that did not ultimately derive from God and in the tenth century a Muslim historian who was trying to exciting about the conquests exalting in them saying that it demonstrated how God had indeed favored the Muslims he described how they had conquered the Roman and the Persian empires we went to meet them with small abilities and weak forces and God made us triumph and gave us possession of their territories and such an explanation for the rise of the Arab Empire to Muslim scholars in the tenth century and from men onwards appeared more than adequate now of course to historians who are not Muslim and particularly to historians who have been raised in a kind of secular tradition post enlightenment tradition a tradition that you do not look to the supernatural you do not look to the divine to explain what why things happened but you explain religion in terms of human motivation rather than divine authority um just saying well it happened because God wanted it to happen is inadequate as an explanation and so that's why over the past few decades really since the 1970s when scholars try to understand how and why it was that a Christian Roman Near East became a Muslim Arab one they turn for explanations not so much as historians used to do in the West to the biographies of Mohammed to the histories to the commentaries on the Koran written by pious Muslims centuries after the events they described but to the context of the world into which Islam was born a world that is called by scholars Late Antiquity so it's the world it's the late autumn of the ancient world when the leaves are starting to turn yellow starting to fall from the trees not an illusion I know makes no sense here whatsoever but for those of you from New England I hope you know what I mean now it to explore the way in which Islam might have derived from the world of Late Antiquity is a huge topic and it would require an entire book to explore it and by great good fortune such a book does exist and is I believe available for sale after this at all but just have to tempt you in persuade you that it might be worth investing your dollars in this book I thought in the time left I'd cover just some of the areas in which I think it makes sense to see the coming of Islam not as a clean break with what had gone before not as a kind of guillotine dropping on the neck of the ancient world but rather as a kind of bloom sprung from its seed bed and as we all know as I said at the beginning as was broadcast in the the newspaper coverage of this talk it is a sensitive business and that being so I will leave the more combustible propositions to the end and begin not with the religious dimensions of the replacement of the Roman and Persian empires with an air of one but with the geopolitical ones and I think that there are sort of interesting echoes here of what is happening in the Middle East at the moment the traditional narrative as I said has the Arabs erupting from the depths of the desert these are warriors who are pristine who appear who are untainted by contact with the corrupt empires in the Fertile Crescent but this is not true the facts are vastly more complex and vastly more interesting and if we want to understand what happened when the Arabs conquered the Roman and the Persian empires we need to look at the whole history of the Roman Empire West as well as East because the challenge for Emperor's right from the heyday of the Roman Empire was to control the frontiers particularly in the West that so along the Rhine along the Danube the lands beyond these frontiers was not worth the effort of conquering and so what the Romans did was to establish Garrison's to establish frontiers and every so often they would send punitive expeditions out to beat up the natives but it was kind of easier basically to you know to hand out bribes to employ the the natives beyond the frontier as mercenaries they to pay these tribal leaders to behave themselves and gradually over the course of the centuries the result of this was that these what had previously been scattered tribal entities began to cohere they became richer they had absorbed Roman military techniques and in the fifth century when the Roman Empire imploded into civil war these tribal communities had become sufficiently Roman had become sufficiently effective as fighting and civic forces that they were able to cross the frontier and essentially take command of what had been the Roman provinces now that doesn't happen in the East because in the desert there are not enough nomads there are not enough Bedouins to do this and that's one of the reasons why the Roman Empire in the East survives when the Roman Empire in the West does not and that enables what the Roman emperors in the sixth century from Constantinople they retain a sufficient military base they can contemplate reconquering the West and under the greatest Emperor Justinian who builds the mighty Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople which still stands there one of the great buildings of the world it looks as if the Roman empires are making a comeback Roman armies we conquer North Africa Sicily Italy even bits of of Spain you know it looks as if Rome is indeed going to be made great again but then series of catastrophes overwhelms the roman empire in the east in 5 4 1 a devastating plague breaks out it begins in egypt and it spreads with a devastating rapidity east and west and there's been a lot of debate about how bad it was contemporary sources say that that anything up to a half the population of the world died and people had always thought that this was an exaggeration but about a decade ago corpses of people who died in germany of this plague were found and were discovered to have died of black death of the plague so the implication of that is that the impact of this plague in the mid 60 what have been even greater than that of the Black Death in which a third of the population of Europe died so utterly devastating and particularly devastating for the Romans because they were an urban civilization and cities are always incubators of disease far more than deserts and the corollary of this was noted by a Roman commander who who observed that that while the Empire's wants countless military units have dwindled in number the plague that ally of war has not so much touched the rancorous tribes of the desert so what you have is almost for the first time a sense that there is a balance of power between the nomads of the desert and the armed forces governing the settlements of the Fertile Crescent and what makes it worse for the Romans is that the plague has also as well as destroying the military base it has also destroyed the taxation base there isn't enough money to keep things going and so there's a kind of massive process of closing everything down roads fortifications Garrison's and in them in the in the Fertile Crescent what happens is that the Romans essentially mothball their fortifications along the frontier with the desert along the Palestinian and Syrian border and these Citadel's these fortresses are abandoned to jackals and to weeds and to Hermits and the defense of that line is subcontracted out to Arab mercenaries and the Arab mercenaries are imported into the military infrastructure of Palestine and Syria and installed there to provide the Roman Empire with their defenses and the same things happens in the Persian Empire along Iraq because what both the persians and the romans are doing is focusing on the main enemy which is one another so the military frontier between the person and the roman empire through what is now northern Syria northern Iraq up into into what is now Turkey that is the focus and the consequence of this is that in the early 7th century the ancient world's equivalent of the Black Death is followed by the ancient world's equivalent of the first world war a devastating conflict breaks out between the Roman and the Persian empires cold war had been going for centuries but this is absolutely devastating and the war lasts for decades and although it's the Romans who ultimately emerged victorious there was a point where it looked as if the entire empire would go under for a generation Syria Palestine Jerusalem Egypt fall under Persian occupation the greatest treasure in the Roman Empire the cross on which Jesus is believed to have been crucified is stolen from Jerusalem and take him as a trophy of war back to the back to back to Iraq and for the Arabs the implications of this are immense because suddenly the supply of gold that they're paymaster's in Constantinople had been paying them has been cut off so they too are embroiled in this Cataclysm so you have war you have plague you have financial collapse and this is a period when everybody in the Near East takes for granted that things that happen happen because God wants them to happen and looking around them you know rather is their doing today I mean Islamic state is a highly apocalyptic cold and their apocalyptic because when they read the Koran they find in the Koran a deeply apocalyptic strain and so I think it is well worth asking was the origins of the Koran this sense that everything is about to end but God in the words of the crown is about roll up the scroll of creation and put it away is this is the background of war and famine and plague and financial collapse to accept is this the motor is this explanation was Mohammed just as monks were just as rabbis were just as the raspbian priests were looking around him at the chaos of the age and thinking what is going on here what is God's purpose and I think it is and I think that there are clues within the Quran that that point to this as an explanation now those of you who have not read the Quran but who may be familiar with the Bible the crown is nothing like the Bible the Bible is full of you know it name-checks all kinds of great powers and famous people from Cyrus the Great to Caesar Augustus these people are not there is only one geopolitical power name-checked in the Koran that's the Romans 1 verse and it says the Romans have been defeated in a nearby land and yet after their defeat they shall be victorious in a few years it seems likely that this is a reference to the great war between the Romans and the Persians and suggests but you know this is big news for whoever the author or authors of the Quran are um and there is another echo of the war in the story that is told of Alexander the Great in the Koran Alexander is not only he's not named but it's recognizably him he's called dhul-qarnain which means the Horned one and coins that were issued in the wake of Alexander's death showed him with the curling ram horns of a moon the king of the Egyptian gods so that's an astonishing thought that in the Kurama seems to be an allusion to the king of the old egyptian gods I mean amazing what is he doing there well this goes back to the story of how the Romans recaptured the true cross from the Persians when her oculus the Roman Emperor who in an astonishing military comeback defeated the Persians he took the true cross and he has courted it back to Jerusalem and he in stored it back in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in celebration of this a man in Syria wrote a story in which Alexander does much the same Alexander is described as going eastwards he defeats the Persians he goes to the limits of the world he walls up tribes called gog and magog who was so repellent that they think nothing of snacking on puppies the staff turds he walls them up behind great gates of brass and there they will remain until the end of days and then he he speaks to Christ and he says that he's going to take his throne and take it back to Jerusalem and set it up there ready for Christ to fit in and it's evident that this story is inspired by her Occulus taking the cross and this story appears almost word-for-word in the crown except that anything that is reminiscent of Christian or Roman propaganda is removed but in the Koran dhul-qarnayn Alexander likewise heads eastwards he confronts gog and magog he walls them up behind gates of brass but as I say there is no mention of of Jesus or of Rome in this and the reason for that is that to the in the Koran empires worldly powers are merely the gusting of grains of sand upon desert winds for every nation the Quran says there is an appointed span of time when their time arrives they can either delay it and will bring it forward even for an instant so if expect the clues forget she but I think they do seem to suggest that the Quran certainly in the form that we have it so the final form was indeed acid by someone presumably Muhammad I mean if Muhammad didn't exist we'd have to invent him in the periods that Muslim tradition has always insisted that he lived and that's great because historically that then means that you can use the Quran as evidence for what some at least of the Arabs in the early 7th century thought they were about thought with going on but can we push it further can we conclude from this but everything that Muslim tradition says about Muhammad and the Quran is is therefore true well no because the familiar problem remains and the glaring problem is this that if what the biographies of Muhammad tell us are true and Mecca was an inveterate Lee pagan city devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence situated in the midst of a vast untenanted desert then how are we to account for the abrupt appearance there of a fully-fledged monotheism complete with references to Abraham to Moses and to Jesus and this is the problem and essentially ever since Western historians began writing about the origins of Islam this is the problem that they have had to wrestle with and various explanations have been proposed of which the most popular is that Mecca was somehow at the center of a great spice trade it was kind of the Dubai of its day and that Muhammad was a Smith was a trader and he went up you know in camp trains of camels and he went to Jerusalem and he went to Damascus and he kind of picked up he heard rabbis and he heard Christian priests and he picked up all this Moses Jesus stuff and then he just bummed it into the Quran this is inadequate as an explanation and it's inadequate for a number of reasons firstly the relationship of the Quran to the Jewish and Christian scriptures is far more sophisticated there are a lot of very very sophisticated echoes in it this is not a guy who is just over hearing something about Moses and putting it in but more complex and more fascinatingly it's evident just from the evidence of the Quran that Muhammad's opponents are not pagan Muslim tradition says they're pagan but when you read the Quran it's a very difficult age basically God or the Prophet arguing with people who are called the mushrikun and the mushrikun are the pagans in of Muslim tradition but from the evidence of the Quran is evident that they too are monotheists that they to know who Abraham and Moses and Jesus are and that essentially what is being argued about is the nature of God not the fact that there is only a single God so it would seem that the Quran and therefore presumably Muhammad is emerging from a culture that is steeped in a kind of biblical monotheism and what's oddest of all is that many of the traditions for Christian traditions in particular that are being cited are very ancient so there are all kinds of echoes and allusions to Gospels that have been banned by the Catholic Church that had come to power under Constantine texts that we only know of because they've been dug up in Egyptian desert and yet you find echoes of them preserved within the cross there are even it seems echoes of texts that were found in among the Dead Sea Scrolls so there seem to be kind of it's almost like the Quran is is a wall of sediment in which fossils have been embedded and what are they doing there where have these ancient texts come from and it's very very mysterious but it's clear I think but the Quran far from originating you know at a remove from this world is like a kind of enormous lake and to which all kinds of streams all kinds of traditions are flowing and mixing and certainly creating something new but the constituent elements clearly come from the ancient Near East and that begs the obvious problem will what is going on here how can the Quran have emerged in this way if what Muslim traditions there's about Mecca is true and I think the answer the way you cut the Gordian knot is actually to say the Quran did not originate from Mecca at least Mecca that we you know in Saudi Arabia where it is now where Muslims go on pilgrimage basically they're going on pilgrimage to the wrong place I think is the implication this is where I duck the evidence seems to me and and certainly not just to me you know I am building this on the back of a lot of great scholarship but the evidence seems to me to point to an origin for the Kron to the north of Mecca basically along the desert frontier of Roman Palestine you remember that first I read out about the Romans have been fighting in a nearby land the implication of that is that you know it's a nearby land but the guy who is writing this is on the frontier of Palestine but also if you were if you know if you wanted one place in the world in the early 7th century there would have been old Christian and Jewish traditions preserved it would have been the deserts beyond the Holy Land because the Holy Land for Jews and for Christians is a place where traditions are preserved and as both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy becomes more and more punitive and heretics are pushed out to the limits they have nowhere to go except out into the Palestinian deserts so if you wanted to find Jewish and Christian texts that have otherwise vanished from the Roman world in the early 7th century the one place I think you would go would be the desert fringes beyond Palestine now the obvious stumbling block here of course is well what about Mecca why why do muslims end up thinking that that muhammad came from mecca and again the solution to this puzzle i think lies in the crown lies in in in reading the quran not in the context of what muslims say about it but just natively as a text in its own terms and when you look about you find something very strange the first is that there is only one mention of Mecca in the whole of the Koran and it is not at all clear what Mecca is you know it might be a city it might be a village it seems likely exactly to be a valley it seems to be a description of a valley only one one mention and then you look at other ancient pegs for a mention of Mecca and the earliest dateable reference to Mecca outside of the crown when do you think it is 741 so more than a hundred years after Muhammad is supposed to have died and you know where Mecca is placed in this text that mentions it in 741 the deserts of Iraq not placed in Arabia at all and then you look at the descriptions of the mushrikun the opponents of Muhammad the people who according to Muslim tradition are meant to have lived in Mecca they are described as agriculturalists they're described as farmers they're keeping cattle they're growing olives they're tending vines there are no cattle in Mecca there are no vines there are no olives it was impossible for the olives that grew at that time to be grown in that far in Arabia it was a Mediterranean crop so the evidence seems to point to the strong likelihood that the opponents of Mohammed at the very least are living in a Mediterranean region and then there is one final icing clinching clue because just as the Quran does not mention great powers great people today also does it not really mention recognisable geographical locations they're only seven place names mentioned in the Quran but there does seem to be one key pointer to where the mushrikuna and therefore by extension Muhammad lived and it's it derives from the story of lot in the book of Genesis you remember lot is the nephew of Abraham and he goes to live in the city of Sodom and the sodomites offend God for all kinds of reasons and are wiped out and lost and his family escape his his wife looks back and gets turned into a pillar of salt and this is this appears in a kind of refracted way in the Quran this is God speaking remember when we delivered lot and all his household except for an old woman who was left behind then we destroyed the others ie the sodomites you pass by the morning and night will you not understand you pass by them the sodomites morning and night so where where were the sodomites to be seen well we know exactly where the sodomites were to be seen because in the early 7th century there was a chapel built to lot on the site it's on the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea between what is now Israel and Jordan and so if the mushrikun are passing these people day and night then the implication of that is that that is where Muhammad is having his arguments with the mushrikun that are recorded in the Quran and I think this is entirely fitting because Islam like Judaism like Christianity is described as Abrahamic religions Abraham the legends that are associated with Abraham in Late Antiquity were focused on the promised land so Palestine and in the deserts that lay beyond it there are no traditions whatsoever in antiquity of Abraham going to where Mecca is now he his children his concubines operated in the deserts beyond Palestine and so I think that that is the place to look for the origins of Islam and it suggests strongly I think that the Quran far from standing at some fantastical remove from the currents and convulsions of the age is in fact the supreme monument to them thank you very much [Applause] if anyone has any questions I have five five minutes if anyone does have any questions okay the question is the question is what is the attitude of the Koran to other religions very tropical because it's having a measurable impact on the lives of people in the Middle East at the moment the answer to that is that the Koran is well aware of the existence of other religions and it's aware of the fact that the Jews and the Christians have the same prophets and so the Quran mandates that Jews Christians and a mysterious people called the sabaeans must be tolerated they must be allowed to practice their religion as they wish but that they must acknowledge their inferiority by in exchange so they must pay a tax called the jizya and as they pay the jizya they must bow their heads and acknowledge their submission everyone else bad news pagans they have to go and the problem for for people in the Middle East and indeed beyond who are there for who are not Christian and Jewish is that if you interpret the Koran literally they are lined up for extermination and they've basically since the 19th century Muslims have not taken those mandates literally what's happened with the Islamic state is that they have begun to take those mandates literally again so I've just been making a film about how Islamic Islamic state is and went to Iraq and spoke to various diseases and Christians and it's evident but Islamic states interpret these verses in the most brutal and violent way possible but that they do having said that Cree Christians and Yazidis for instance differently so the the demands that Christians pay the jizya is interpreted as a license to extort and stripped Christians of everything so when I first moved into Mosul they essentially took over all Christian property and expelled the Christians but they didn't kill them when they came to the easy Dee's who have a very kind of strained to our eyes strange religion they were condemned as mushrikun as pagans and verses were interpreted to mean that the men had to be exterminated and the women who were liable to become slaves and it is frankly I wrote shadows or the books that my talk has been based on before the rise of Islamic state and it never crossed my mind as I was writing it but I would witness scenes comparable to what I had been writing about as a description of the 7th century armies sweeping across deserts destroying idols taking slaves practicing genocide I would never have imagined that and that is why again I mean I say that this is this is in one level ancient history but it is also lethally contemporary history as well and the understanding of this material it's like approaching a fissile material in a nuclear reactor has to be handled with extreme care yes sir and then no no as I say Christians are tolerated and indeed there is a sense in which the more questions you have the richer you are because you screw money out of them and it was always a financial problem for that sort for various Muslim states where we know you're a Christian you're paying enormous man's tax the obvious solution is to become a Muslim and that really is why so many Christians in the Caliphate India in the medieval period converted to Islam and it was always a massive problem because one day the Vizier would come to the Calif and say we are only Christian slickest and yes in in biographies in biographies well it does it as I said it appears on the Dome of the rock in in in 690 and from that point on Muhammad's name does appear in various inscriptions it's it's hid and then it's really only the biographies the detailed accounts of his life the whole idea of the Arabs being an entirely new magic people that had nothing to do with civilization which is so important traditional count is not true they were deeply embedded in the fabric of the Roman the Persian empires as mercenaries they had entire kingdoms one at the hour of Kings in the 6th century was a consul of the Roman people these were highly highly romanized people and that I think is really the explanation for what happens is that just as in Western Europe barbarian leaders are barbarian you know they're not calling themselves Roman but they are dressing themselves up in Roman robes they're building Roman buildings when they can because Rome is is the archetype of power so in the same way that's what the Muslims or the Arabs who become the Muslims I don't think that something called Islam comes into being until about you know 850 really 750 sorry and what they are doing is manufacturing a religion that explains why God has given them this vast empire and that evolves over time it's basically a kind of you know it's it's it's it's the equivalent of manifest destiny the notion that God has given you know the sweep of the continental America to the United States is so important in the 19th century to provide you need it justifies Americans in pushing westwards and coming to California and taking land from Mexico if you just nicking stuff that's not good enough you've got to say God wants you to have it that is and that basically is what is what Islam is evolved as I have to stop that but I will answer your question and answers you

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Views: 605,075

Rating: 4.0565352 out of 5

Keywords: The Origins of Islam, Tom Holland, RMWF, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Id: eDQh2nk8ih4

Length: 54min 51sec (3291 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/omfalos]

Some Bedouin tribes had a lucky break at the battle of Yarmouk, so a religion was created ad hoc to capitalize on the victory.

[u/numberonealcove]

Anybody else find the snickers from the audience at key points very telling about what this lecture intends to achieve?

[u/brewmastermonk]

This was an interesting lecture. I'll have to look up more from this guy.

[u/1_k_b]

I would have loved to have heard some alternative or real facts on the history of Islam but this guy is just full of of historical revisionism and hacks.

[u/QuilSato]

Damn, Hoping to see Spiderman.

[u/brenwolf]

Damn, that is a fascinating theory he arrives to at the end.