Islam: The Untold Story Page #2

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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.

The Bedouin think they know

everything about Mohammed,

his character, his wives,

even his favourite food.

This is a whole world

founded on stories of Mohammed.

But the problem is, how do we know

this was what it was like?

How can we separate what really

happened from hearsay and myths?

Do we know, did the

Prophet Mohammed come here?

Was there a tree?

Was Mohammed even a

travelling merchant?

The evidence is almost non-existent.

The earliest biographies we have

were written nearly 200 years

after Mohammed's lifetime.

In most religions,

the tradition was handed down

through oral history,

for millennia.

This was put aside,

now it's called positive history.

The oral tradition

is completely negated.

Well, oral tradition means that

you remember what you want.

Some of it must be history, but most

of it is clearly not history.

It's just that they had been

reshaped, rethought,

they had been taken

out of their original context,

serving new functions,

they'd been cleaned up by...

Cleaned up, or messed up

if you like,

by all kinds of interests

that people have in the memory.

Supposing there is no written

text of the time of the Prophet

mentioning his name, the same is true

of Christ, the same is true of Moses,

that doesn't mean anything because

there is always the oral tradition.

Sometimes if you have other

sources from other points of view,

you can suddenly see what it is

that's been changed, and then

when you can see that, you can

also see why it has changed,

but because Islam arose

in a relatively remote

corner of the world,

we don't have these checks,

we don't yet have the key

that can unlock the tradition.

I came here to get close

to the tradition,

and when you're here

you can feel its weight.

It's in the air.

It's palpable.

It can't just be brushed aside.

Millions upon millions

of people believe it -

this is their history.

An entire moral universe

has been built around

the stories told of Mohammed.

Listening to all these stories,

part of me is very moved,

the other part of me is wondering,

"Well, how do you know this?

"Where do these stories come from?

"Are they really true?"

Gradually in the West,

for the intellectual elite,

the sense of the sacred was lost.

A tribal person in Africa

or in the Amazon

has a natural sense of the sacred,

whereas a graduate student

at Oxford probably doesn't.

THEY PRAY:

THEY PRAY:

In some places, you have to be

careful where to tread.

Muslims believe

that from the very beginning,

the great Arab conquests

were all about Islam.

But in the 7th century,

you can barely find

a new religion called Islam

anywhere in the historical records.

And that's why I've come here.

This is Jerusalem.

They've been building walls

here for a long time.

But they've never built a wall yet

that could keep people

safe for ever.

Historically,

the capital city of God

has always been one of the world's

most conquerable places.

Here, if anywhere,

in the one-time world

of the Roman Empire,

the 6th and 7th centuries live on.

The same intensities,

the same anxieties.

For thousands of years,

Jerusalem had been shaped and mapped

by the religions of its rulers.

When the Jews ruled,

they built a gigantic temple

which dominated the city.

Later, when the Roman Empire

became Christian,

Jerusalem was transformed

into the world centre

of Christian pilgrimage.

Look at the street plan now and

you saw a map of a Christian world.

The Jews were gone,

airbrushed out of the picture.

The Romans constructed

a new holy of holies.

The Holy Sepulcher,

A vast cathedral, raised over

the traditionally accepted site

of Jesus' crucifixion.

That was how God and Empire worked.

The Roman Empire believed in God...

..and God believed

in the Roman Empire.

But then,

in the year 636,

God changed his mind.

Arab marauders

appear outside the walls.

Sophronius, the city's Bishop,

writes that it is too

dangerous to leave.

The Arabs were closing in.

And there was nothing

people of Christian Jerusalem

could do about it,

except to stay where they were

look out from their walls

and await the arrival of the Arabs.

And out of the desert they came.

And they had become irresistible.

In 636,

they beat a Roman army at Yarmouk.

Soon after, they beat

a Persian army at Qadisiya.

Both empires too weak after their

own long wars to resist the Arabs.

They marched into the richest

provinces of the defeated empires.

And less than five years

after the death of Mohammed,

they set their eyes

upon the Promised Land.

The land flowing

with milk and honey.

The land that God

had promised to the Jews.

Now the Arabs had come to claim

that birthright for themselves.

The Children of Israel

had made it a Jewish land.

The Romans had made it

a Christian holy land.

If the Arabs did arrive

with a new religion,

then we should be able

to find its imprint here.

Contemporary Christian sources

confirmed that, late in the 630s,

the Arabs took over Jerusalem

by peaceful negotiation.

What they don't say

is what the conquerors'

religion was.

The truth of the matter

is we don't know

what was the true religion

of the first Arab conquerors.

We have a problem because this

group of people from Arabia is tiny.

They are ruling over

much larger populations,

who are very well versed

theologically,

of Christians and Jews

and Zoroastrians,

very sophisticated religious ideas.

Why would these populations

not have risen up in rebellion

against their Muslim rulers if these

Muslim rulers are trying to impose

something totally different that was

hostile to their own beliefs?

What were the Arabs up to?

What were their motives?

We know they called themselves

believers, but believers in what?

Certain Christian contemporaries

tell us that the Arabs believed

in a single god and that

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