Islam: the Untold Story, review

Were the Arabs of the seventh century Muslim at all? Tom Holland, the populariser of ancient history in bestsellers such as Rubicon, which examined the triumph and tragedy of the Roman Republic, kept on asking questions like that during Islam: the Untold Story (Channel 4). Untold it remained. After scrolling through typescripts on microfilm he exclaimed, “There’s nothing there,” as if it was rather annoying that Mohammed had not taken the trouble to leave behind a miniaturised account on spools of celluloid.

There was the usual problem of television abhorring a visual vacuum. But at least in this case it meant that Holland was finding nothing in some agreeably sunny settings, balancing excitingly on the supposed ruins of Sodom, or asking some Bedouin around a camp fire in the desert about the first years of Islam. However wisely leather-cheeked and gap-toothed they might be, it is hard to see why they should be better informed on such matters than workers from the Sunderland car plant would be about the life and times of the Venerable Bede.

Holland’s equivalent talking head to the Germans was the Danish Professor Patricia Crone. Even she does not doubt that Mohammed existed or even that the Koran is a collection of his utterances. But she questioned the centrality of Mecca in the origins of Islam, believing it had Jewish as well as Arabian roots.

Holland, however, makes it a very Arab invention indeed. His overarching theory was that Islam did not provoke Arab expansion, but was itself formed by the Arab conquests that rapidly won an empire. He likes seeing things in terms of empires, and suggested that a ruler such as the caliph who put Mohammed on the coin endorsed the prophet in the same way Constantine used Christ – to bolster his authority. But surely that would only work if the Prophet already had a defined following.

By then my mind was distracted by the documentary’s crowning annoyance: Holland’s habitual pause in mid sentence, like someone announcing the winner of an Oscar. He wanted to know “where the Koran might actually, PAUSE, two, three, four, have come from”.

We got no answer, being sidetracked into historiography, a subject even less suited to pictorial representation than a hole in the manuscript evidence. Holland’s confident conclusion was: “Studying ancient history is a process of paint-stripping.” I hope his next subject is not Leonardo.