In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
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Tom Holland. (2012). In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tom Holland. 2012. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Tom Holland. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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1. • role: Author
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     Tom Holland is a historian of the ancient world and a translator. His books include Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, Persian Fire, In the Shadow of the Sword and The Forge of Christendom. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilization of Ancient Greece and Rome.” He lives in London with his family.
     Visit the author's website at www.tom-holland.org.
     

   • name: Tom Holland

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2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

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title

In the Shadow of the Sword

fullDescription

The acclaimed author of Rubicon and other superb works of popular history now produces a thrillingly panoramic (and incredibly timely) account of the rise of Islam.
 
No less significant than the collapse of the Roman Republic or the Persian invasion of Greece, the evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement.  Just like the Romans, the Arabs came from nowhere to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion—except that they achieved their conquests not over the course of centuries as the Romans did but in a matter of decades. Just like the Greeks during the Persian wars, they overcame seemingly insuperable odds to emerge triumphant against the greatest empire of the day—not by standing on the defensive, however, but by hurling themselves against all who lay in their path.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Malise Ruthven, Wall Street Journal
   • content: "[Tom Holland's] conclusions may be tentative, but they are convincing. His book is elegantly written and refreshingly free from specialist jargon. Marshaling its resources with dexterity, it is a veritable tour de force."
2. • premium: False
   • source: David Frum, Daily Beast
   • content: "Those unwilling to struggle through academic texts have long needed a guide to the story of Islam as it's understood by those with the fullest access to the latest linguistic and archaeological evidence. Now at last in Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword, they finally have it.... Holland--author previously of Rubicon and Persian Fire--is about as exciting a stylist as we have writing history today.... [This book is] accessible but delightful...as fun to read as any thriller, and with far richer intellectual nutritional content."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Anthony Sattin, Guardian Observer (London)
   • content:
     "The life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam are boldly re-examined in this brilliantly provocative history.... [An] ambitious and...important book.... Holland is a skilful and energetic narrator, and while he guides us along the more intricate twists and turns of the period, he also keeps our eyes on the bigger story."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content:
     "[An] elegant study of the roiling era of internecine religious rivalry and epic strife that saw the nation of Islam rise and conquer.... Holland confronts questions in the Quranic text head-on, providing a substantive, fluid exegesis on the original documents. Smoothly composed history and fine scholarship."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Barnaby Rogerson, the Independent (London)
   • content:
     "This is a book of extraordinary richness. I found myself amused, diverted and enchanted by turn. For Tom Holland has an enviable gift for summoning up the colour, the individuals and animation of the past, without sacrificing factual integrity. He writes with a contagious conviction that history is not only a fascinating tale in itself but is a well-honed instrument with which we can understand our neighbours and our own times, maybe even ourselves. He is also a divertingly inventive writer with a wicked wit – there's something of both Gibbon and Tom Wolfe in his writing... [and] he possesses a falcon eye for detail.... [A] spell-bindingly brilliant multiple portrait of the triumph of monotheism in the ancient world."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Christopher Hart, Sunday Times (London)
   • content:
     "This dramatic investigation of the origins of Islam is both a thrilling narrative history and a compelling piece of detective work.... A compelling detective story of the highest order, In the Shadow of the Sword is also a dazzlingly colourful journey into the world of late antiquity. We encounter brain-eating demons; a caliph with such oral-hygiene problems that he could kill a fly with one breath; and that old favourite, St
     Simeon Stylites, rotting away on his pillar but still managing to miraculously cure a man with unfeasibly large testicles, "like a pair of clay jars". Every bit as thrilling a narrative history as Holland's previous works, In the Shadow of the Sword is also a profoundly important book. It makes public and popular what scholarship has been
     discovering for several decades now: and those discoveries suggest a wholesale revision of where Islam came from and what it is."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Bywater, The Week (London)
   • content:
     "[M]agnificent...and brave....The historian and author of Rubicon and Persian Fire has now, after five years' work, come up with In the Shadow of the Sword. His story is so compellingly told that it could almost be Dan Brown, except that Holland writes brilliantly, with a simultaneously dashing, meticulous and at times ravishingly camp style, and his tale is true."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Philip Hensher, The Spectator (London)
   • content:
     "Tom Holland is a writer of clarity and expertise, who talks us through this unfamiliar and crowded territory with energy and some dry wit.... [T]he emergence of Islam is a notoriously risky subject, so a confident historian who is able to explain where this great religion came from without illusion or dissimulation has us greatly in his debt."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "An entertaining account of the f
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2012
      Elegant study of the roiling era of internecine religious rivalry and epic strife that saw the nation of Islam rise and conquer. British historian Holland (The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West, 2009, etc.) first tells the tortuously involved tale of the rise and fall Persia, or what he calls Iranshahr, an empire imbued by the spirit of the prophet Zoroaster, who believed that a terminal confrontation between good and evil was imminent; it was also heavily influenced by the Jews, natives of Judah in diaspora to Mesopotamia, who were at work transcribing the written record of their rabbis and looking forward to a Messiah who would offer redemption from suffering. Meanwhile, Rome, whose own Virgil had broadcast its glorious mission statement, "a dominion without limit," in the Aeneid, was besieged by barbarian tribes and on its knees by the first centuries CE, threatened by an implacable rebellious heresy, Christianity. Yet another current began to swell, similarly foretold in the Old Testament scriptures, such as in the account of Abraham's begetting a son by the Egyptian maid Hagar, who would become Ishmael, heir to a great people, and Daniel's terrifying apocalyptic vision of four beasts ruling in succession over mankind. So what was this new nation rising from the feral wanderings of "the wolves of Arabia," seemingly portended in the bubonic plague decimating the Fertile Crescent in the sixth century? Holland portrays the age as ripe for the revolutionary visions of the Prophet, who certainly drew most self-consciously from tenets of previous People of the Book. Holland confronts questions in the Quranic text head-on, providing a substantive, fluent exegesis on the original documents. Smoothly composed history and fine scholarship.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2012
      Undertaking the delicate task of describing the origins of Islam, Holland notes Western scholarship that is skeptical about Islamic scholarship's narratives concerning the life of the prophet Muhammad, the compilation of the Qur'an, and even how Mecca became the geographical focus of Islamic worship. So the refuge Holland seeks in the evidentiary desert is the geopolitical world of the time. It was dominated by the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanian Persian Empire, whose political conflicts and religious doctrines (Catholicism and Zoroastrianism, respectively) reverberated mutedly but apparently audibly among the pagan tribes of Arabia. Holland allows that his narratives of these dynamics constitute provisional answers in his inquiry into the rise of Islam, but he writes them in an exuberantly ornate style that captures late antiquity's prevalent belief that nothing on the lowly earth occurred but by the will of God. God's will, though, was, as ever, difficult to divine, and Holland's interpretations of debates among clerics and revelations by prophets before Muhammad carry the reader toward Holland's plausible thesis for Islam's success in toppling the Sassanians and humbling the Romans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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No less significant than the collapse of the Roman Republic or the Persian invasion of Greece, the evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement.  Just like the Romans, the Arabs came from nowhere to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion—except that they achieved their conquests not over the course of centuries as the Romans did but in a matter of decades. Just like the Greeks during the Persian wars, they overcame seemingly insuperable odds to emerge triumphant against the greatest empire of the day—not by standing on the defensive, however, but by hurling themselves against all who lay in their path.

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The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

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   • description: Religion / Islam / History
3. • code: SOC048000
   • description: Social Science / Islamic Studies