Islam: The Untold Story Page #2

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of her richest provinces,

crushed the Persian Empire,

and taken possession of

most of the Middle East.

A staggering achievement.

For most Muslims, a miracle.

Only God could have made it happen.

Bedouin Arabs,

they were the margin of history

during the Roman Empire,

that through such a people

the whole of North Africa and Spain

should be transformed

in just a few decades,

and a whole new civilisation

created within a century

from China to France.

This is historical fact.

And it all began, the story goes,

when a merchant named

Mohammed in a mountain cave,

heard something as terrifying as it

was awesome, the voice of an angel.

"Oh, Mohammed,

thou art the apostle of God."

God had spoken to the Arabs.

HE PRAYS:

THEY PRAY:

The message was as clear

as it was elemental.

There is only one God.

Mohammed is the prophet of God.

Islam is submission to God.

And it was this message

that gave them an empire.

Or was it?

No-one doubts the conquests

really took place,

but the question is,

was it because of Islam?

If you were a Christian or a Jew

or a follower of another religion

for whom a similar reality exists,

it would be easier to make a jump.

There is a very famous

Arabic proverb which says,

"Not being able to know something

is no proof that it doesn't exist."

But making that jump,

taking a leap of faith,

isn't as easy as it sounds.

In Western universities, historical

research is all about scepticism

and doubt.

And just as earlier generations

of scholars

turned a penetrating spotlight

on the life of Jesus,

so now some are taking a radical

new look at the life of Mohammed.

Patricia Crone is

a professor at Princeton,

she was one of a number of

historians

whose research into

the roots of Islam

has sharply divided the world

of early Islamic studies.

"You cannot reject

the Muslim story", she wrote,

"but you cannot accept it, either.

"The only solution is to step

outside of the Islamic tradition,

"and start again."

There is a curtain, as regards

Mohammed, that you can't get behind.

What do we know about him

and his life?

Ah, well, we know that he existed,

we know that he was active

somewhere in Arabia,

we know that he is associated

with the book the Koran,

he was the one who uttered it,

but it doesn't get us

to what actually happened,

which is what, of course, a

historian would like to reconstruct.

We have absence of evidence.

We have the Koran,

and you can't tell

the story of the basis of the Koran.

We have various early

non-Muslim sources.

They don't add up to a story.

We have nothing, we have this one

book out of...and nothing.

There is complete darkness.

But here,

that's not the way they see things.

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