In the Shadow of the Sword

In the Shadow of the Sword is a history book charting the origins of Islam by Tom Holland. Scholarship The work draws from the revisionist scholarship of Patricia Crone (and further refinements produced by John Wansbrough, Fred Donner, Andrew Rippin, Christoph Luxenberg et al) in applying rigorous textual analysis to the Hadithic corpus. Holland asserts that the oldest extant biographical details about Muhammad are writings by theological scholars post-dating his death by nearly two hundred years who needed to justify their tools and authority, that there is no mention of the Quran or any associated commentary in any source till as late as eighth century AD and that Mecca is not located to any geographical precision in the Quran. Emphasizing on these premises, he questions the mainstream view on early days of Islam deriving from later-era Muslim sources as entirely flawed in its conflation of literature with history and instead, seeks to sketch a broad-brush revisionist history about the development of Islam as a socio-political response to the gradual rise of Arabs over two centuries. Holland holds that Quranic imagery does not tally with desert Arabia and assigns Islam's birth-place to be Syria-Palestine; he goes on to retrieve Muhammad as a member of a literate Jordanian elite who knew the power of faith and say that Gabriel's revelations along with other mainstay features of Islam were actually perfected editions of a set of ideas borrowed from the changing societies in the Near East and existing religions. Reception