‘Islam: A New History’ Gives Sweeping Introduction To One Of The World’s Largest Religions
(REVIEW) In the year 610 CE, a 40-year-old Arabian caravan merchant from the commercial capital of Mecca was meditating in a hilltop cave near the city when the angel Gabriel suddenly appeared to him.
Grasping him tightly around the chest, the heavenly being commanded him to “Read! In the Name of your Lord.” Though the merchant, Muhammad, claimed to be illiterate, he nonetheless obeyed the divine messenger and began to utter verses from what would come to be known as the Qur’an.
By the year of his death, 22 years later, Muhammad was regarded by his growing band of followers as a prophet, successor to Jesus, Moses, and other major figures from the Hebrew Bible and the founder of a new faith, Islam.
Following the narrative of Islam’s journey from tribal origins to world religion, scholar John Tolan offers those new to the study of the faith a firm foundation in its rich past and current status in his new book, “Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present.”
Much like Christianity’s early decades, Islam faced an uncertain future at the outset. Muhammad was both misunderstood and mistreated by his contemporaries, including members of his own tribe.
Were it not for the support of his wife, Khadija — Islam’s first convert — and his uncle, Abu Talib, the Prophet (as Muslims reverently refer to Muhammad) might never have succeeded in establishing the new religion which, like Judaism and Christianity, was based on divine revelation. Foundational to all three faiths is monotheism, which the Qur’an established as a premise for peaceful coexistence among Jews, Christians and Muslims: “[Y]ou have your religion and I have mine” (Q 109:6).
This may come as a surprise to those more familiar with the doctrine of jihad (an “effort” to follow God’s path), at least as practiced by current Islamic extremists. Of the thirty or so references to the word in the Qur’an, only ten invoke warfare, though typically of the defensive, as opposed to offensive, sort.
There is no question that military campaigns propelled Islam’s expansion during its early centuries. Still, anyone familiar with the Book of Joshua or Europe’s Thirty Years' War knows Islam hardly cornered the market on armed religious conflicts.
“Conversion by the sword” was also largely a myth. Under most Islamic empires (Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ottomans, for example), the rise and fall of which Tolan methodically and succinctly chronicles, Jews and Christians were accommodated or at least tolerated as “dhimmis,” a word meaning “protected people.”
As such, they were allowed to practice their faiths, albeit as second-class citizens who were required to pay a special tax. Tolerance went hand in hand with practicality here: forcing a whole segment of the population to convert meant a loss of state income. Commerce and trade, in fact, were just as responsible, if not more so, for the spread of Islam across Africa, the Near East and Central Asia.
In addition to commodities, the exchange of ideas was another by-product of Islam’s success story. More dialectic than didactic, the great medieval philosophers of Islam’s “Golden Age” encouraged discourse with their Jewish and Christian counterparts, hoping to “reveal the harmony between philosophical truths” of their respective faiths.
So ascendant was Arab culture in intellectual circles during the Middle Ages, one Andalusian Christian scholar “noted with alarm that young Christians could no longer read and write correct Latin, but that they were all capable of writing sophisticated poems in Arabic.”
The aftermath of humiliating Western colonization in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte’s “liberation” of Egypt in 1798 is the focus of the book’s third and final section, “Modernities.” Subsequent colonial rule provoked both “collaboration and resistance,” Tolan writes.
The record of Western meddling and double-dealing in Middle Eastern affairs during these years was self-serving and shameful: the violent division of India and Pakistan (by the English), the creation of Iraq (another English political whim), the oil-thirsty busting up of Iran’s budding parliamentary government in 1911 (a joint Anglo-Russian plot). The ongoing fallout from these and other such examples of Western imperialism during the early decades of the last century left the Muslim world fractured and embittered.
While many of its residents strove for independence, others sought revenge, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaida, the Taliban and other extremist organizations are rooted in resentment of the long history of Western intervention. It is impossible to explain the rise of radical Islamism, conservative movements such as Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism or the Iranian Revolution without an essential grasp of this history, which Tolan neatly summarizes.
Like most mainstream, organized religions, Islam is a big tent. Corralling the various ideologies, sects, divisions, major players and developments over the course of some fourteen hundred years into a digestible narrative is no easy job, and Tolan’s effort is both daunting and admirable.
To what degree the book offers a “New History” of the faith, as the subtitle promises, is debatable. Much of its content will be familiar territory to scholars and historians of Islam. “Comprehensive” might have been the better choice of adjective here, and no less deserving.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.