What a controversially exciting book for the Muslims of the world. Its an honour to get a serious scholar like Tom Holland actually researching the history of the Muslims and presenting theories that help fill out many gaps in the known Muslim history. Read on if you are slightly concerned about the various claims put together by the Ulema about the authenticity of the Quran guaranteed by Allah; read on if you want to know why there is a period of almost 200 years of literally silence after the death of Muhammed; read on if you are naive enough to believe that there were no factions during and after Muhammed; keep reading to learn about the great Ummayid dynasty and their most illustrious Khalifa Abd Al Malik, enlighten yourself if you think that Islam is any different from the Roman, Persian or Christian empires preceding it;read and learn about the concept of jihad;absorb the effects of what a serious piece of historical history should look like. I wish we had one historian within the Islamic domain with balls enough to tackle such interesting issues instead of hiding behind the huge and comfortable but undefinable 'wall of faith'.
This book is the serious version of Salman's Rushdie's Satanic verses, with a lot of conjecture but without any cheap or dirty fantasy analogies. Is there any scholar in the Muslim domain who can stand up and issue a serious rebuttal to this book or are we going to have to rely on some Western scholar to help us out yet again? I have asked Zia Uddin Sardar to reflect.
I have just read a pretty damning review by Zia Uddin Sardar in which he tries to take Tom's effort apart. But the issue is that history is not Zia's area of speciality. What is badly needed is a Muslim historian adept in global history and then handling these questions with some level of respect.
Tom concludes in the end that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. I think Muslims have to rise to the challenge again.
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