Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
    In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
    In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
    Audiobook18 hours

    In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

    Written by Tom Holland

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. In this exciting and sweeping history-the third in his trilogy of books on the ancient world-Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization. With profound bearing on the most consequential events of our time, Holland ties the exciting story of Islam's ascent to the crises and controversies of the present.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 12, 2015
    ISBN9781494581145
    In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
    Author

    Tom Holland

    Tom Holland is the author of a range of books on ancient and early medieval history. He has translated Herodotus and Suetonius, presented TV documentaries on subjects ranging from dinosaurs to the Islamic State, and been described by The Times as 'a leading English cricketer'.

    More audiobooks from Tom Holland

    Related to In the Shadow of the Sword

    Related audiobooks

    Islam For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Man Who Sacked Rome

      Jun 9, 2020

      The Man Who Sacked Rome
      7 min read

    • Article

      Not A Holy War

      May 19, 2021

      Not A Holy War
      9 min read

    • Article

      The End Of Empire

      Jun 17, 2020

      The End Of Empire
      8 min read

    • Article

      Empire Of The Greats

      Apr 14, 2022

      Empire Of The Greats
      9 min read

    • Article

      When In Rome!

      Nov 17, 2022

      When In Rome!
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Franks Had Lost The Battle Of Tours

      Nov 30, 2023

      Having established a strong Islamic foothold in the Iberian Peninsula, aspirations of territory and power north of the Pyrenees was perhaps a logical step to take. But the region between Poitiers and Tours was not just a step, it was a giant leap, an

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Way Of The Future

      Jun 8, 2021

      The Way Of The Future
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Enemy Within

      Mar 2, 2020

      The Enemy Within
      6 min read

    • Article

      Theme The Middle Kingdom

      Oct 19, 2021

      Theme The Middle Kingdom
      6 min read

    • Article

      Richard the Lionheart

      Mar 27, 2020

      Richard the Lionheart
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Europeans Take Over

      Mar 2, 2020

      ANYONE RIDING A horse automatically feels “superior” to people who are not riding horses. They feel that way because they are looking down on the pedestrians, knowing that the pedestrians will always get out of their way. On a horse, one “naturally”

      10 min read

    • Article

      Wrath Of The Pharaohs

      Jul 15, 2021

      Wrath Of The Pharaohs
      11 min read

    • Article

      Evolution Of The Knight

      Mar 27, 2020

      Evolution Of The Knight
      9 min read

    • Article

      The First Sultan Saladin

      Mar 25, 2021

      The First Sultan Saladin
      11 min read

    • Article

      Culture Chronicle

      Jul 4, 2021

      Culture Chronicle
      7 min read

    • Article

      This Month In… 49 Bc

      Dec 28, 2022

      This Month In… 49 Bc
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Dynasty Of Despots

      Oct 27, 2022

      A Dynasty Of Despots
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Khanate of Crimea

      Dec 28, 2023

      The Khanate of Crimea
      7 min read

    • Article

      Muslim Rulers Of The Waves

      Oct 28, 2021

      Muslim Rulers Of The Waves
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ravenna The Second Rome

      Jul 15, 2021

      Ravenna The Second Rome
      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Survive the Dark Ages

      Sep 1, 2022

      How To Survive the Dark Ages
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for In the Shadow of the Sword

    4/5

    137 ratings12 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Didn't really seem to have a unifying point or a strong conclusion.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book a lot less than I expected. It's well-written and thought-provoking, but less than it could have been.

      Ultimately In the Shadow of the Sword is two books in one: a narrative history of the rise of Islam, and a revisionist history challenging traditional assumptions about Islam's origins. Both intertwine in a way that is entertaining but slight. Too often the need to keep the narrative moving forward stops Holland from fully making the argument he wants to: that the Prophet Muhammad emerged not from the Hejaz, as traditional assumptions say, but from the deserts of Mesopotamia, the free-wheeling political and religious borderland where Arab tribes had lived for centuries between Romans and Persians, Christians and Zoroastrians. Instead, these arguments are often made in passing and by implication.

      To be fair, Holland couldn't have done much better. Contemporary sources are so scarce for this period — once one discards later efforts that may or may not be accurate — that making a positive argument about Muhammad's origins away from Mecca is basically impossible. He has to rely on coins, inscriptions, fragments of writing and observations from foreign observers to fill in the gaps left by the suspiciously late emergence several centuries later of Muhammad's traditional biography. This isn't enough to prove alternatives, but is enough to raise doubts about the traditional history.

      I found the weakest part to be the first half, which is only obliquely about the Arabs at all. Instead, Holland goes into detail about the histories of two subjects he's written about before: the empires of Byzantine Rome and Sassanid Persia. This was interesting in itself (or would have been had I not recently covered almost all of it listening to the History of Byzantium podcast) and sometimes foreshadowed important developments, but largely felt like a distraction from the book's core thesis.
    • 4/5
      Very good look at not only the rise of Islam but also of the state of the Christian, Pagan, and Jewish religions at the time period and how they all intertwined and mingled with each other more than their prospective religious leaders would have liked. Holland does a good job of presenting the convoluted mess that is the origins of Islam as well as the hypocritical views of the Christian and Jewish faiths. The intro/first chapter was sort of plodding to me and had me worried about the rest of the book, however that fear was quickly put to rest and the book really took off writing wise.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Easy reading & well worth it. 2 critiques:

      1. He often quotes contemporaries fantastical view of events straight up when it is quite obvious he is slightly mocking them, which is fine once in a while but it becomes repetitious shtick
      2. He hints at but doesn't really answer the question he posed at the beginning - what are the origins of the Quran and Islam and who is the Mohammed character?

      In the documentary he did and in interviews he is much more forthcoming about his theories on point 2. Anyone reading this book should also watch the documentary and listed to his interview with Robin Pearson from the History of Byzantium podcast (as well as Robin's podcast on the topic of the Origen of Islam). I get that they are just theories and perhaps he was a bit reluctant to be too concrete and explicit in a book so as not to be accused of replacing one fantasy for another.

      One last point: for every other major religion existent (and non-existent) today where there are tons of popular science*-based overviews, Holland's book is the first on the shelf for this topic and he does a damn good job. To his credit he's cracked the nut, opening the doors for others to popularize a more scientific approach to the origins of Islam.

      * by science I mean critical, skeptical & evidence-based approaches not based on the evidence-free premise that any given religion is the word of God/s
    • 4/5
      Mr. Holland presents us with his take on the rise of Islam and an image of the world of the 500 - 600's CE that somehow mirrors some aspects of our own times. His writing style slips back and forth between the lively and the sensational and provides an entertaining survey of the period.The end of the Persian-Roman dyarchy in the Middle East and the insertion of the Byzantine-Islamic dyarchy is his theme, and the method is to draw a rather sensational view of the preceding century, playing up the great plague of the mid-500's and the resulting lack of manpower and energy to resist a new irruption of relatively barbaric conquerors from the Arabic desert. The career of the emperor Heraclius neatly straddles the fall of the Persians, and the creation of the Byzantine-Islamic frontier that will remain constant for the following four and a half centuries. So Heraclius' dramatic story gets more attention than usual.It is necessary as well to cover the state of the religion of the Zoroastrians of the period, and this is a useful addition to historians of the Middle East as there is little coverage of this group, especially in such a popularized format. Holland explains how these believers came to be classified as a "People of the Book". This brings us to the major theme of "In the Shadow of the Sword".while Edward Gibbon gave us the initial Impression that Islam arose from a drive to civilize on the part of the Arabs embodied in creation of their own religion, and Toynbee saw Islam arising from a need for a declining civilization, the Syriac, to embody itself in a new world religion, Mr. Holland doesn't explore the idea of why Islam arose.His field is a review of several of the intellectual strains that were interwoven into the Islamic Carpet (I'm sorry, couldn't resist that!) and a revisionist view of how Islam could have assumed its outlines by the end of the Umayyad Dynasty and the rise of the Abbasids, who presented the new faith in the guise that is familiar to us today.In history we would like to have a period in which we possess an objective account, firmly buttressed with references from surrounding cultural groups, and tied to a firm chronology, with easily recoverable archaeological evidence. Mohammad's time doesn't fit that description, if we are using anything but the received account starting with a firm belief in the truth of Mohammad's recorded revelation, direct from Allah through the medium of an angelic guide. But as the period saw wide-spread violence in the area studied, a large movement of cultural groups and perhaps deliberate destruction relating material. Like Christianity in its first century and a half, Islam is not a well documented religion until after 750.Holland creates a good deal of doubt that the standard account of the Prophet should be uncritically received. He manages to make us think about whether or not Mecca was the original shrine of Islam, whether the body of lore "The Hadith" was ever quotes from the Prophet, instead of a body of opportunistic rulings by a priestly class trying to evolve a workable institution, and whether the lack of prior writings of a religious nature in Arabic or stemming from the inhabitants of the Arabian Desert, is not the result of a rigorous intellectual cleansing of contentious or competing strains of religious writing from that area by the Abbasid dynasty bent on totalitarian rule.It makes a very readable book, and makes us wonder if the creation of religions should not join legislation and sausage making as areas rewarding caution on the part of the consumer.
    • 3/5
      Central thesis is powerfully demonstrated and explored: the corpus of Muslim belief and practice was not delivered in a oner by an illiterate chap called M** in a remote corner of Arabia. It grew up over the two centuries of Arab conquest in the 8th and 9th centuries, incorporating myth, ritual, law and tradition from all the cultures of the Near East, especially Judaism and zoroastrianism. I'd always assumed that the Islamic story was reasonably authentic, though i knew that there has never been anything as rigorous as the Western biblical criticism. and i knew there were some variations in the islamic instructions on things like alcohol. but here we learn that the Koran lays down stoning as punishment for adultery , whereas Sharia law says "Stone them!", or rather "Stone her!" and that is Jewish. The Koran says: pray 3 times a day, the Sharia says five, and so on. I wold have liked much more of this, but Holland goes off after the first section on a huge digression which forms the bulk of the book; we get detailed histories of Byzantium (down to what Theodora wanted to do with her tits), of Iran including every fratricidal feud and Aryan assassination, and of Central asian tribes without number. This is perhaps there to give context, but is hard work dealing with myriad obscure groupings and short-lived dynasties. All is written in Holland's slightly purple suspense-building style which is fine, but i would rather have had the full meal on the shaky foundations of Islam promised by the title, subtitle and intro.
    • 4/5
      What should be an interesting read, was actually a very hard slog. Too many characters and a style which I found hard work.
    • 4/5
      In depth and well documented telling of the origins of the Religions of Abraham. However, the authors style is circumspect and at time difficult to preserver. This is not a book for someone who's memory of 'Ancient History' has faded. Nonetheless, worth the effort.
    • 3/5
      Very enjoyable and lively journey through the clash of dying empires of Rome and Persia, and the rise of an Arab empire at an age when montheistic desert religions were codifying their belief systems and becoming entrenched in those empires.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed this book and will now go back and read his earlier ones. He writes history as a good and grand story with you closing the book and almost wondering what happened next.This is a difficult time in history, with people re-writing it to suit their chosen narrative. Also there are so many groups, tribes, sects that getting a handle on their differences can be fleeting. It's complicated.Nevertheless one gets a sense of the fleeting and long lasting changes that happened and a sense of the size of the territory covered, both geographic and political.The birth of all three Abrahamic religions are covered here, with their gradual formation and constant revision.
    • 4/5
      This history of the birth of Islam and the parallel decline of the Persian and Roman Empires is an ambitious project. Basically Holland is attempting to track monotheism from cult to the norm across the known world of the time. And its a worthy effort - particularly some of the lesser known (to me anyway) threads, such as the growth of Zorastrianism and the border battles between the Roman and Persian empires - bloody battles, with loss of many lives, in places we have barely heard of amongst people we know little about . Holland's dissection of the birth of Islam, and its origins in the many swirling stories of what we now call the Middle East is also well doneThe problem is Holland's writing. His jaunty populist style seems inappropriate at times - do we really need the image of, for example, "areas of Constantinople where the Emperor would never deign to show his dainty perfumed sandel" ? This tabloid style spoiled it for me - I realise he has used this style in all his 3 previous books, but here it seems overcooked, as if he is compensating for the lack of document and lack of fact, with a documentary style that can't work. A shame
    • 3/5
      If you didn't know the author, the title of this book and its cover illustration - a fallen helmet with vacant staring eye-sockets lying in the desert sand - give the impression of an epic historical novel. Distribution too; I bought a soft cover "airport edition" - a channel better known for promoting the latest books by best-selling authors. Although in its style and structure it reads like a novel - somewhat florid prose, and dramatic interruptions in the narrative to allow the reader to catch up on another part of the plot - anyone who buys the book under this expectation will soon realize that what they actually have is a hardcore history book.It is essentially an attempt to present a historical account of Mohammed and the early history of Islam, as opposed to the idealized version subsequently enshrined in the religion that was founded in the name of the prophet. In order to achieve this, the author traces the development of the three major religions of antiquity - Christianity, Judaism and the Zoroastrianism of the Sassanian Persian empire. This forms the essential context for explaining the rapid spread of Islam on the back of the Arab conquest of the ancient east early in the seventh century. He describes how some form of monotheism was by this time already pervasive in most of what we call the middle east. And this did not exclude the Arabs; thousands had moved north, where they could make a profitable living, policing the borders of both Byzantine and Sassanian empires as mercenaries, and where at the same time they were likely to have been influenced by the winds of monotheism. Crucially, he presents compelling arguments why Mecca - a thousand miles south in the middle of the Arabian Desert - could not have been the flourishing entrepot and major pre-Islamic religious center which Muslim tradition (although not the Qu'ran) would have it. Instead, he locates the place from which the prophet migrated to Medina and then returned to in triumph as somewhere on the Palestinian/Syrian border - perhaps even Mamre, where Abraham - the father of the Arabs as well as of the Jews, had pitched his tent beside a Terebinth tree. It was not until half a century after Mohammed's death, that the non-exclusive community of "believers" that he had founded was transformed into Islam, "submission" , by Abd al Malek the Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. Just as the Byzantine emperors had felt the need to stamp out different versions of Christianity and impose an orthodoxy on all their subjects, and just as the Rabbis of the Talmud labored to define minutely every aspect of Jewish life, so the leader of the first Arab empire needed to establish a defining central orthodoxy for his huge and diverse realm. That orthodoxy was Islam, a religion exclusively for the Arab conquerors, whose holy language was Arabic, and whose geographical origins were deep in Arabia.The book eventually achieves its objective - but the road is long and winding. Some examples: The third chapter "New Rome" - although harking back to the origins of Rome - is essentially a narrative about Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. How is it possible to get 28 pages into such a narrative before the word "Christian" occurs? Apparently - as far as the story so far is concerned - Constantine's only significant achievement was moving the seat of empire to Byzantium. Then there are pages of panegyrics about Justinian's efforts to codify Roman law, but nothing about his ecclesiastical policies or his success in recapturing the lands of the western empire overrun by the barbarians in the previous century. The next section of this chapter swoops back in time to recap the growth of Christianity, Constantine's role in its establishment as the religion of the Roman state, and eventually Justinian too. Judaism gets a similar switchback treatment; starting with the Talmudic academies in 6th century Babylon, we flash back to Edessa where Jewish and Christian identities were being fought over in the 3rd century, and finally - in a chapter entitled "The Children of Abraham", which leads with six pages on Christian monastics and pilgrims - we get a potted history of the Jews from the time of Abraham up to the "present". i.e. 6th century Palestine.The scholarship, in as much as I am qualified to judge it, is impeccable. The voluminous chapter notes are evidence of the thoroughness of Holland's research and the comprehensiveness of his sources. His reference to the marginal role of the rabbis until the 6th century, when they firmly established themselves as the leaders of the community and teachers of Jewish Law, is an example of how his narrative reflects recent state-of-the-art scholarship. His sources on Islam seem to include the most recent critical studies by Ibn Warraq and Fred Donner and others I am not familiar with.The problem is Tom Holland's style; you never know quite where he is going. The narrative's swerves and switchbacks occur quite stealthily; in each chapter there is always a crucial turning point, which leads to his plot objective; you find yourself doing a backward search in an effort to find out how you got to where you are. The other book of his that I have read (Millenium/ The Forge of Christendom), starts at the end of the "story" with the dramatic meeting between the German emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory at Canossa. There it worked, because in a way the whole book is about the efforts of the Catholic Church to achieve its independence from emperors. In the present book I feel it works to the detriment of the narrative. The other distraction in the present book is the way he switches from a sweeping historical perspective to minute - and often prurient - details, like the halitosis of Abd al-Malek or the sexual antics of the empress Theodora before she got religion and married Justinian. Perhaps he really is trying to appeal to an audience that doesn't normally read "real" history, and would not swallow a straightforward chronological narrative - good luck with that.