Islam: The Untold Story Page #5

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Where do you think the likeliest

place of its origin is?

Ah.

Well. That, I don't know.

(LAUGHS)

That, I don't know.

Er, I don't think

I should speculate on that.

OK. All right. (LAUGHS)

OK.

'My greatest fear is

that I'm completely wrong.

'I do sometimes wake up

in the middle of the night

'and think I've got it

completely wrong.'

'Once the world is reduced

'to a mechanical world,'

then all other levels of reality

lose their status as being real.

And they're relegated to the realm

of so-called superstition.

'And what is not seen...

'is considered not to exist.'

Trying to track the origins of Islam

has been like chasing a mirage.

The Arabs conquer half the world,

but they don't talk about Muhammad.

There's no mention of Mecca.

So what do they do

in detective stories?

They follow the money.

Are any of these,

what's the first coin

that actually mentions

the name of the Prophet Muhammad

on the coins?

Do any of these coins

mention Muhammad by name?

(INDISTINCT)

Yeah, but is the name

of the Prophet Muhammad mentioned?

No, no.

Every coin tells a story.

Every inscription

conveys an idea of power.

But sometimes,

what's not on the coin

can be just as significant

as what is.

It would be nice to see the earliest

coin that mentions Muhammad.

The earliest coin that has

Muhammad's name, they don't have it.

It's just, it's odd that we're 60

years on from the death of Muhammad,

and no mention of Muhammad.

For nearly 60 years,

the rulers of the Arab empire

didn't put Muhammad on their coins.

And then they did.

Maybe, 60 years

was what they needed

to work out what the story

really was.

Maybe the issue isn't why

Muhammad was not on the coinage

at the beginning, but

how he got there in the end.

What if I've been asking

the wrong question?

What if it wasn't Islam

that gave birth to the Arab empire?

But the Arab empire

that gave birth to Islam?

The Empire was rich

beyond imagining.

By the mid-680s, it stretched

from northern Persia to Egypt

and North Africa.

But who had the right to rule it?

A vital question on which

the Arabs could not agree.

And with so much to play for,

they began to turn upon themselves.

It's 680.

50 years on

from the death of Muhammad.

A deadly spiral of rebellion

and civil war is threatening

the Arab empire with implosion.

And from deep within

the Arabian Desert,

a new claimant

to the empire emerges.

His name?

Abdullah Ibn Al-Zubair.

And Ibn Al-Zubair

is going to change the game.

What I've got here is the coin

that I was looking for

in the Coin Museum.

And it's stamped, quite literally,

with the genius of Ibn Al-Zubair.

It was struck in 685, 686,

so that's more than half a century

after the death of Muhammad.

And it bears a novel

and fateful slogan,

"In the name of God,

Muhammad is the prophet of God."

And so here, at last,

emerging from out of the black hole,

we get a mention

of a Muhammad who is a prophet.

And this is the first time

we have it on any inscription,

any surviving document.

Ibn Al-Zubair had essentially

realised what Constantine,

the first Christian Roman emperor,

have realised long before him,

that it was no good the Lord

of an earthly empire

laying claim to the favour of God,

unless he could absolutely

demonstrate the cast-iron basis

on which he was making that claim.

And Constantine, in his attempt

to obtain that sanction,

had turned to the Christian church.

But Ibn Al-Zubair

turns to the figure of Muhammad.

Now, as it happens, Ibn Al-Zubair

loses the civil war,

he is defeated by a rival warlord

who lays claim

to the empire of the Arabs.

But the discovery

that the name of Muhammad

can be used to buttress earthly

power, that is not forgotten.

The civil war had been

a very close-run thing.

And the victorious warlord,

Abd al-Malik,

had no intention of ever again

allowing Muhammad's legacy

to fall into the hands

of a dangerous rival.

The Romans had known

all about religion and power.

When they had become Christian,

they had redrawn

the map of Jerusalem.

Now, Abd al-Malik set about

fashioning a holy city of his own.

God, it's beautiful.

The dome of the rock.

It's the oldest Islamic

building in existence.

In design, it was Roman,

and Abd al-Malik was doing

something else that was Roman.

Plugging his dominion

into the power of God.

On the walls, there is

an unequivocal mission statement.

"Religion, in the eyes of God,

is Islam."

There are mentions of Muhammad,

quotations from the Koran.

At last, something that

we can recognise unmistakably

as a new religion.

There is a sense here

of something new coming into being.

There is the sense of the old, the

Roman-style pillars and the mosaics.

And yet, this is clearly not Roman,

this is clearly not Christian,

this is the beginning

of something very, very potent.

A harbinger of a spectacular future.

It was built on the very site

of the old Jewish Temple.

Down here,

the foundation stone of the world.

The very junction

of heaven and earth.

This is quite possibly

one of the most awesome places

on the entire planet.

It is deeply, deeply holy,

not to one,

but to two great religions.

It's the place where Jews

believe God inhabits the Earth,

the holy of holies, the Shekhinah.

And to Muslims, it is the cave

that Muhammad prayed in

after being brought here from Mecca

before he ascended to heaven

to be confirmed

as the seal of the prophets.

So in religious terms, this

is like a sort of nuclear reactor,

firing out isotopes and power.

It's certainly

a very grand statement,

that we Muslims

have superseded you Jews.

And we have superseded you Christians

by being filled with inscriptions

directed against

Christian Trinitarian beliefs.

So it's Muslims saying,

we are here, we've come to stay,

and we are the winners.

Abd al-Malik now rules his empire

as the deputy of God,

just as the Christian

Roman emperors had done.

And like the Roman emperors, he has

built a house of God in Jerusalem.

But Abd al-Malik, Lord of Jerusalem

though he is, is also an Arab.

Perhaps for Arabs, Jerusalem,

for all its ancient

and unrivalled potency,

owed too much to the Jews

and Christians to stand alone

as the holy city

of the new Arab empire.

A poet at Abd al-Malik's court

describes him

as the Lord of two houses,

sacred to God.

One in Jerusalem,

and one, well,

he doesn't say where it is.

And for 100 years

after the death of Muhammad,

no-one says where it is.

All sources go on calling it

"A place in the desert."

It's a sanctuary in the desert,

without giving it a name.

And at some point, this sanctuary

must have been fixed at Mecca,

in the middle of the desert.

But why?

The truth of the matter is,

we don't know what was the true

religion of the first Arab cultures.

It's an Arab story.

Arabs come from the desert.

God is speaking to the Arabs.

They don't want Jews or Christians

having any influence on Muhammad.

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