
Islam: The Untold Story
- Year:
- 2012
- 74 min
- 36 Views
1,400 years ago, armies of nomads
swept out of the Arabian desert
and conquered half the world.
Today, their descendants tell
an extraordinary story.
They say that God sent them
and that God
then gave them an empire.
But is it really true?
Not everyone is so sure.
The Muslim conquests were one of
the most decisive events in history.
But were the Arabs in
the 7th century even Muslims at all?
My name's Tom Holland.
I'm a historian.
I write about ancient empires so,
Persian, Greek, Roman empires.
Now I want to write about the most
influential of all these empires -
the empire founded by the Arabs
in the 7th century -
the empire that gave us Islam.
a relatively simple matter.
It's been said that Islam was born
in the full light of history.
But when I began on the project,
I discovered that wasn't
actually the case at all.
When it comes to Islam's beginnings,
there is no full light of history.
Only a kind of darkness.
And when you start looking,
everything seems up for grabs.
From the beginning, I felt like I
was being sucked into a black hole.
The problem of authorising
the history of the rise of Islam
is that we have absence of evidence.
We have nothing
on which to tell a story.
I had expected Muslim testimony
from the 7th century.
But there's nothing there.
I can't find anything.
There's a problem here.
You're delving into the origins
of Muslims' deepest beliefs
but where is
the historical evidence?
Sometimes the belief of the
believer,
and the understanding of the
scholar, cannot be squared.
It's a choice between doing history
and not doing history.
So I do the history,
even though it may hurt people.
You have to say things
that believers don't say.
Things that sometimes
shock believers.
Things that sometimes
make them very angry.
There's a sense
of the detective story about it.
Why do most of the clues
seem to be missing?
When the Romans conquered
the Middle East, they left behind
histories, inscriptions, coins.
But with the
Muslim conquest, silence.
What can we actually say
about Mohammed?
What do we really know
about the origins of Islam?
Where to begin?
at the beginning of the 7th century.
It is five minutes to midnight
and the ancient world
This is Istanbul.
In 632, it was Constantinople.
For 300 years, the capital city
of the Roman Empire.
A Christian city
at the heart of a Christian world.
A universal religion
for a universal empire.
That was the Roman recipe for power.
An idea fully appreciated
by the Muslims
when almost 1,000 years later,
they conquered the city
and turned the largest cathedral
in Christendom into a mosque.
We know how and when
because contemporaries
tell us all about it.
But what we don't know
is how the Arabs became Muslim.
Take a journey into the past
and you can't be certain
where it's going to end.
History is like a labyrinth.
Once you're inside,
So, here we are - the Great Palace
of the Roman emperors
of Christian Constantinople.
Odd to think that, at the start
of the 7th century,
when Mohammed was still alive,
this was pretty much
the centre of the world.
There's one awful poetry about
the fact that all you've got here
is splintered firewood.
Because what this is, is something
that's been smashed to smithereens.
What it preserves
just the faintest trace of is, um,
what was, at the time,
the hub of the greatest power
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"Islam: The Untold Story" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2019. Web. 11 Dec. 2019. <https://www.scripts.com/script/islam%3A_the_untold_story_10996>.