Islam: The Untold Story

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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

a prophet - Mohammed -

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.

I thought that it would be

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

all kinds of evidence -

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?

Well, maybe we should start

at the beginning of the 7th century.

It is five minutes to midnight

and the ancient world

is about to change for ever.

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

the Romans became Christian

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,

who knows where it may lead?

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

on the face of the earth.

This is the White House -

it's where the Emperor lives.

It's the Pentagon. It's the heart

of the defence establishment.

It's the Supreme Court - where laws

are drawn up and made and issued.

All in this one place

that dominates Constantinople,

the city of Constantine,

the first Christian Empire -

the greatest city in the world.

And now it's all gone.

And it's in some bloke's garden.

You've got the road on one side,

you've got the train on the other.

And the only thing

to be seen is a cat.

By 630, the Roman Empire

had just overcome

the worst crisis in its history.

Its old enemies, the Persians,

had overrun its fairest provinces.

Persian troops had reached the very

walls of Constantinople itself.

Then, after 25 years of war,

the Persians were defeated.

The Roman emperor was,

once again, master of the universe.

At such a moment, how could

he have had any conceivable idea

of the ruin that the heavens

had in store for him?

Professor, can someone like myself,

who is not a Muslim

and who does not believe

that God spoke to Mohammed,

ever hope to fathom

the truth of the origins of Islam?

No.

Bedouin,

the face of the Arab Conquest.

The shock troops, who in the

7th century swept out of Arabia

and forged a colossal empire,

spanning half the world.

And here in the desert,

no-one doubts that the conquerors

were indeed Muslim.

Everything was for Islam,

that's what they say today,

the victories, the conquest,

the empire.

But how do we know Islam

even existed back then?

To the ancients,

the Arabs were notorious savages.

Of all the peoples of the earth,

the most despised and insignificant.

Yet after ten years in

the first half of the 7th century,

they'd deprived the Roman Empire

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

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