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00:00:001,400 years ago, armies of nomads swept out of the Arabian desert and conquered half the world.
00:00:23Today, their descendants tell an extraordinary story.
00:00:30They say that God sent them a prophet, Muhammad, and that God then gave them an empire.
00:00:40But is it really true? Not everyone is so sure.
00:00:45The Muslim conquests were one of the most decisive events in history.
00:00:51But were the Arabs in the 7th century, even Muslims at all?
00:01:00No, no, no, no, no.
00:01:10My name's Tom Holland.
00:01:12I'm a historian, I write about ancient empires, so Persian, Greek, Roman empires.
00:01:17And now I want to write about the most influential of all the ancient empires.
00:01:20The empire founded by the Arabs in the 7th century, the empire that gave us Islam.
00:01:27I thought that it would be a relatively simple matter.
00:01:30It's been said that Islam was born in the full light of history.
00:01:35But when I began on the project, I discovered that that wasn't actually the case at all.
00:01:39When it comes to Islam's beginnings, there is no full light of history, only a kind of darkness.
00:01:47And when you start looking, everything seems up for grabs.
00:01:55From the beginning, I felt like I was being sucked into a black hole.
00:02:00The problem of writing the history of the rise of Islam is that we have absence of evidence.
00:02:17And we have nothing on which to tell a story.
00:02:19I had expected Muslim testimony from the 7th century.
00:02:32But there's nothing there.
00:02:35I can't find anything.
00:02:42There's a problem here.
00:02:44You're delving into the origins of Muslims deepest beliefs, but where is the historical evidence?
00:02:54Sometimes the belief of the believer and the understanding of the scholar cannot be squared.
00:03:05It's a choice between doing history and not doing history.
00:03:08And so I do the history even though it may hurt people.
00:03:15You have to say things that believers don't say.
00:03:21Things that sometimes shock believers.
00:03:26Things that sometimes make them very angry.
00:03:30There's a sense of the detective story about it.
00:03:36Why do most of the clues seem to be missing?
00:03:40When the Romans conquered the Middle East, they left behind all kinds of evidence.
00:03:45Histories, inscriptions, coins.
00:03:48But with the Muslim conquest, silence.
00:03:52What can we actually say about Mohammed?
00:03:57What do we really know about the origins of Islam?
00:04:01Where to begin?
00:04:05Well, maybe we should start at the beginning of the 7th century.
00:04:11It is five minutes to midnight.
00:04:15And the ancient world is about to change forever.
00:04:19Forever.
00:04:35This is Istanbul.
00:04:37In 632, it was Constantinople.
00:04:42For 300 years, the capital city of the Roman Empire.
00:04:47A Christian city at the heart of a Christian world.
00:04:51A universal religion for a universal empire.
00:05:02That was the Roman recipe for power.
00:05:05An idea fully appreciated by the Muslims when, almost a thousand years later,
00:05:13they conquered the city and turned the largest cathedral in Christendom
00:05:19into a mosque.
00:05:21We know how, and when, the Romans became Christian because contemporaries tell us all about it.
00:05:33But what we don't know is how the Arabs became Muslim.
00:05:39Take a journey into the past, and you can't be certain where it's going to end.
00:05:44History is like a labyrinth.
00:05:48Once you're inside, who knows where it may lead?
00:05:52So here we are.
00:06:06The great palace of the Roman emperors.
00:06:11The great palace of the Roman emperors.
00:06:15The great palace of the Roman emperors.
00:06:18Of Christian Constantinople.
00:06:23Odd to think that at the start of the 7th century, when Muhammad was still alive,
00:06:30this was pretty much the centre of the world.
00:06:37There's one awful poetry about the fact that all you've got here is splintered firewood.
00:06:42Because what this is, is something that's been smashed to smithereens, and what it preserves just the faintest trace of is what was at the time the hub of the greatest power on the face of the earth.
00:07:05So 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, it's where laws are drawn up and made and issued.
00:07:14All in this one place that dominates Constantinople, the city of Constantine, the first Christian empire, the greatest city in the world.
00:07:23And now it's all gone.
00:07:26And it's in some bloke's garden.
00:07:28You've got the road on one side, you've got the train on the other.
00:07:30And the only thing to be seen is a cat.
00:07:41By 6.30, the Roman Empire had just overcome the worst crisis in its history.
00:07:47Its old enemies, the Persians, had overrun its fairest provinces.
00:07:52Persian troops had reached the very walls of Constantinople itself.
00:08:01Then, after 25 years of war, the Persians were defeated.
00:08:07The Roman emperor was, once again, master of the universe.
00:08:11At such a moment, how could he have had any conceivable idea of the ruin that the heavens had in store for him?
00:08:24And it was aress of some بالتructuring, the forces of the dead to the highest...
00:08:30Professor, can someone like myself who is not a Muslim
00:08:56and who does not believe that God spoke to Mohammed, ever hope to fathom the truth of the origins of Islam?
00:09:04No.
00:09:26Bedouin, the face of the Arab conquest, the shock troops who in the 7th century swept out of Arabia
00:09:37and forged a colossal empire spanning half the world.
00:09:41And here in the desert, no-one doubts that the conquerors were indeed Muslim.
00:09:48Everything was for Islam. That's what they say today. The victories, the conquest, the empire.
00:10:03But how do we know Islam even existed back then?
00:10:20We've got faith and citizens and all that we do not live on sin.
00:10:25We've got faith.
00:10:27The Muslims are all under the roof.
00:10:30We are the people who are under the roof of the earth.
00:10:34To the ancients, the Arabs were notorious savages,
00:10:45of all the peoples of the earth, the most despised and insignificant.
00:10:56Yet after ten years in the first half of the 7th century,
00:11:00they deprived the Roman Empire of her richest provinces,
00:11:04crushed the Persian Empire,
00:11:06and taken possession of most of the Middle East.
00:11:14A staggering achievement.
00:11:18For most Muslims, a miracle.
00:11:21Only God could have made it happen.
00:11:24Bedouin Arabs, they are the margin of history during the Roman Empire.
00:11:32That through such a people, the whole of North Africa and Spain
00:11:38should be transformed in just a few decades,
00:11:41and a whole new civilization created within a century from China to France.
00:11:46And this is a historical fact.
00:11:55And it all began, the story goes,
00:11:57when a merchant named Mohammed in a mountain cave
00:12:00heard something as terrifying as it was awesome,
00:12:03the voice of an angel.
00:12:07Oh, Mohammed, thou art the apostle of God.
00:12:11God.
00:12:20God had spoken to the Arabs.
00:12:32Allahu Akbar.
00:12:34The message was as clear as it was elemental.
00:12:49Allahu Akbar.
00:12:51There is only one God.
00:12:54Mohammed is the prophet of God.
00:12:57Islam is submission to God.
00:13:00And it was this message that gave them an empire.
00:13:06Or was it?
00:13:07Allahu Akbar.
00:13:09No one doubts the conquests really took place.
00:13:15But the question is, was it because of Islam?
00:13:20If you were a Christian or a Jew, or follow another religion,
00:13:28for whom a similar reality exists,
00:13:33it would be easier to make a jump.
00:13:39There's a very famous Arabic proverb,
00:13:42which says not being able to know something is no proof that it doesn't exist.
00:13:52But making that jump,
00:13:54taking a leap of faith,
00:13:57isn't as easy as it sounds.
00:14:00In Western universities,
00:14:05historical research is all about scepticism.
00:14:10And doubt.
00:14:14And just as earlier generations of scholars turned a penetrating spotlight on the life of Jesus,
00:14:19so now some are taking a radical new look at the life of Mohammed.
00:14:28Patricia Croner is a professor at Princeton.
00:14:31She is one of a number of historians whose research into the roots of Islam
00:14:36has sharply divided the world of early Islamic studies.
00:14:39You cannot reject the Muslim story, she wrote,
00:14:44but you cannot accept it either.
00:14:49The only solution
00:14:51is to step outside of the Islamic tradition
00:14:55and start again.
00:14:59There is a curtain as regards Mohammed that you can't get behind.
00:15:03What do we know about him and his life?
00:15:06Ah, well, we know that he existed.
00:15:11We know that he was active somewhere in Arabia.
00:15:15We know that he is associated with a book, the Koran.
00:15:19He was the one who uttered it.
00:15:21But it doesn't get us to what actually happened,
00:15:27which is what, of course, a historian would like to reconstruct.
00:15:31We have absence of evidence.
00:15:37We have the Koran, and you can't tell the story of the basis of the Koran.
00:15:41We have various early non-Muslim sources.
00:15:46They don't add up to a story.
00:15:48We have nothing.
00:15:50We have this sort of, this one book out of, and nothing.
00:15:54There is complete darkness.
00:15:56But here, that's not the way they see things.
00:16:02The Bedouin think they know everything about Mohammed.
00:16:07His character, his wives, even his favourite food.
00:16:13This is a whole world founded on stories of Mohammed.
00:16:18We live on the margins.
00:16:20And it is the only one who carries food and food and Islam.
00:16:28We live on this and we take patience.
00:16:34The patience is hard.
00:16:36And it is in the water, and the food and water.
00:16:40And this is the one who influences it by the Muslims, and theair.
00:16:43To the help of the Islam, we have to patience.
00:16:45We can use this word to express the word of Islam, God willing.
00:16:55But the problem is, how do we know this was what it was like?
00:16:59How can we separate what really happened from the hearsay and the myths?
00:17:05Do we know, did the Prophet Muhammad come here or not?
00:17:09Yes, when I came out of Mecca to the Shaman and came to the region.
00:17:15There was a tree in the Shafawi.
00:17:21Was there a tree?
00:17:23Was Muhammad even a travelling merchant?
00:17:26The evidence is almost non-existent.
00:17:32The earliest biographies we have were written nearly 200 years after Muhammad's lifetime.
00:17:40In most religions,
00:17:45the tradition was handed down through oral history
00:17:50for millennia.
00:17:53This is put aside.
00:17:57It was called positive history.
00:18:02The oral tradition is completely negated.
00:18:04Well, oral tradition means that you remember what you want.
00:18:12Some of it must be history.
00:18:15And most of it is clearly not history.
00:18:19It's just that they have been reshaped, rethought.
00:18:22They have been taken out of their original context,
00:18:24serving new functions.
00:18:27They have been cleaned up by all kinds, or cleaned up or messed up, if you like,
00:18:32by all kinds of, you know, interests that people have in the memory.
00:18:37It's supposing there is no written text
00:18:41at the time of the prophet mentioning his name.
00:18:45The same is true of Christ.
00:18:48The same is true of Moses.
00:18:50That doesn't mean anything, because there's always the oral tradition.
00:18:54Sometimes, if you have other sources from other points of view,
00:19:01you can suddenly see what it is that's been changed,
00:19:04and then, when you can see that, you can also see why it has changed.
00:19:08But because Islam arose in a relatively remote corner of the world,
00:19:14we don't have these checks.
00:19:15We don't yet have the key that can unlock the tradition.
00:19:25I came here to get close to the tradition.
00:19:31And when you're here, you can feel its weight.
00:19:38It's in the air.
00:19:41It's palpable.
00:19:45It can't just be brushed aside.
00:19:51Millions upon millions of people believe it.
00:19:57This is their history.
00:20:01An entire moral universe has been built around the stories told of Muhammad.
00:20:06This is his history of Hinduism.
00:20:07This is a secret to the Islam.
00:20:16One of the few people say,
00:20:20oh, like that,
00:20:21I can attempt to get to it.
00:20:23I'm afraid that I'm afraid of doing the torture.
00:20:25It ran out of him.
00:20:27It ran out of him a hole.
00:20:29It ran out of people to come,
00:20:31and it ran out of people from the village.
00:20:34FAL يجيب البنت ويدفنها ويحيت .
00:20:43أمر أبي الخطاب .
00:20:45وله بنت .
00:20:46وجه ok.
00:20:49وجرس E.
00:20:51العرمل على شاربة من هون .
00:20:54وجدها غامست تقول بالرملت .
00:20:58حفر إليها OED
00:21:00and milk.
00:21:05Mr. Muhammad came,
00:21:08and I was standing in all these things.
00:21:18Listening to all these stories,
00:21:21part of me very moved.
00:21:25The other part of me
00:21:28was wondering, well, how do you know this?
00:21:31Where do these stories come from?
00:21:34Are they really true?
00:21:45Gradually in the West,
00:21:48for the intellectual elite,
00:21:51the sense of the sacred was lost.
00:21:55Tribal person in Africa,
00:22:00or in the Amazon,
00:22:02has a natural sense of the sacred,
00:22:05whereas a graduate student at Oxford probably doesn't.
00:22:08Please say neutrin.
00:22:18Allahi, Allahi, Allahi, Allahi, Allahi.
00:22:21Allah
00:22:28God has called you
00:22:37God is the Most Way
00:22:39Allah is the Most Way
00:22:45God is the Most Way
00:22:47Allah is the Most Way
00:22:49I love the other person, that's right.
00:22:51Wow, God, the other person who has to live in the world.
00:22:54See?
00:22:55Look, he's going to come to me.
00:23:02I fell down.
00:23:05He's going to come to me.
00:23:07I see.
00:23:08You can go, he's going to come,
00:23:09I see it.
00:23:10I see that.
00:23:11Sorry, yeah, I see.
00:23:12I see a lot.
00:23:13Get out of my feet.
00:23:14Get out of my feet.
00:23:15All I need to start to call,
00:23:16everything is right.
00:23:18In some places, you have to be careful where you tread.
00:23:42Muslims believed that from the very beginning, the great Arab conquests were all about Islam.
00:23:51But in the 7th century, you can barely find a new religion called Islam anywhere in the
00:23:56historical record.
00:23:59And that's why I've come here.
00:24:03This is Jerusalem.
00:24:06They've been building walls here for a long time.
00:24:14But they've never built a wall yet that could keep people safe forever.
00:24:26Historically, the capital city of God has always been one of the world's most conquerable
00:24:32places.
00:24:33Here, if anywhere, in the one-time world of the Roman Empire, the 6th and 7th centuries live
00:24:46on.
00:24:47The same intensities, the same anxieties.
00:25:00For thousands of years, Jerusalem had been shaped and mapped by the religions of its
00:25:16rulers.
00:25:23When the Jews ruled, they built a gigantic temple which dominated the city.
00:25:31Later, when the Roman Empire became Christian, Jerusalem was transformed into the world centre
00:25:39of Christian pilgrimage.
00:25:40Look at the street plan now, and you saw a map of a Christian world.
00:25:46The Jews were gone, airbrushed out of the picture.
00:25:50The Romans constructed a new holy of holies.
00:25:53The Holy Sepulchre.
00:25:56A vast cathedral, raised over the traditionally accepted site of Jesus' crucifixion.
00:26:03That was how God and empire worked.
00:26:13The Roman Empire believed in God, and God believed in the Roman Empire.
00:26:25But then, in the year 636, God changed his mind.
00:26:35Arab marauders appear outside the walls.
00:26:40Sophronius, the city's bishop, writes that it is too dangerous to leave.
00:26:49The Arabs were closing in, and there was nothing people of Christian Jerusalem could do about
00:26:55it, except to stay where they were, look out from their walls, and await the arrival of
00:27:02the Arabs.
00:27:13And out of the desert they came, and they had become irresistible.
00:27:19In 636, they beat a Roman army at Yarmouk.
00:27:24Soon after, they beat a Persian army at Kadassir.
00:27:30Both empires too weak, after their own long wars, to resist the Arabs.
00:27:37They marched into the richest provinces of the defeated empires.
00:27:43Unless than five years after the death of Muhammad, they set their eyes upon the promised land.
00:27:52The land flowing with milk and honey, the land that God had promised to the Jews.
00:27:59Now, the Arabs had come to claim that birthright for themselves.
00:28:13The children of Israel had made it a Jewish land.
00:28:17The Romans had made it a Christian, holy land.
00:28:22If the Arabs did arrive with a new religion, then we should be able to find its imprint here.
00:28:37Contemporary Christian sources confirm that late in the 630s, the Arabs took over Jerusalem
00:28:43by peaceful negotiation.
00:28:46But what they don't say is what the conqueror's religion was.
00:28:53The truth of the matter is we don't know what was the true religion of the first Arab conquerors.
00:29:02We have a problem, because this group of people from Arabia is tiny.
00:29:07And they're ruling over much larger populations, who are very well-versed theologically,
00:29:15of Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians, but very sophisticated religious ideas.
00:29:20Why would these populations not have risen up in rebellion against their Muslim rulers
00:29:26if these Muslim rulers were trying to impose something totally different
00:29:30that was hostile to their own beliefs?
00:29:34What were the Arabs up to? What were their motives?
00:29:38We know they called themselves believers, but believers in what?
00:29:44Certain Christian contemporaries tell us that the Arabs believed in a single God
00:29:49and that they followed a guide or instructor.
00:29:54But in general, their understanding of what the Arabs believed was deeply confused.
00:30:01Was it a form of Judaism or some kind of Christianity?
00:30:05Or did they have a whole new religion of their own?
00:30:10For the Jews as well as for the Christians.
00:30:14These are people coming from the desert.
00:30:17They don't know who these people are.
00:30:20They don't really know what they believe.
00:30:22They hear things.
00:30:24But perhaps there was a clue.
00:30:31At first, the new Arab rulers seemed closer to the Jews.
00:30:37They weren't interested in the Christian holy places.
00:30:40Instead, they began praying on the ruins of the old Jewish temple.
00:30:45All this only added to the Christian's sense of paranoia.
00:30:49Behind the invasion of the Arabs, they began to suspect a Jewish conspiracy.
00:30:58The moment the Arabs took over Jerusalem, they headed straight up here
00:31:02to what then is now is a broad, open, man-made esplanade.
00:31:08The holiest place to Jews anywhere in the world.
00:31:12So the fact that the Arab conquerors came up here and started building a prayer hall on such a sensitive spot
00:31:19inevitably served to raise quite a few eyebrows.
00:31:24The Jews hoped that these Arabs from the desert come as liberators.
00:31:31They permitted the Jews to come back to the Temple Mount and pray there.
00:31:37And the Jews started believing that maybe there is something messianic in these people
00:31:46and maybe their leader is the Messiah who will permit them to rebuild the Temple.
00:31:53Christian theologians who speak about the Arab conquerors find it very hard to understand that they are dealing with a new religion.
00:32:06Who are they?
00:32:09One thing is absolutely clear.
00:32:11Nobody had any notion that the Arabs were doing what they were doing in the name of a freshly minted and coherent new religion.
00:32:22Still less that what they were doing was in the name of something called Islam.
00:32:27So did Islam even exist in those early years after Muhammad?
00:32:36In Jerusalem, 30 years after the conquest, it was business as usual.
00:32:42There were Christian pilgrims in the streets.
00:32:46The churches were full.
00:32:51Ancient religions were practising their ancient rites.
00:32:58But where was the prophet in all this?
00:33:02Thirty years after the death of Muhammad, here in Jerusalem, an Arab warlord called Muawiyah was hailed as leader of the new Arab empire.
00:33:12But if Muawiyah was a Muslim, then he showed precious little sign of it.
00:33:17The astonishing thing is that nowhere, not on his inscriptions, not on his coins, not on any of his documents, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad.
00:33:36I've been trying to trace the origins of Islam.
00:34:01But it's a bigger mystery than I'd ever imagined.
00:34:10This is the holy book of Islam.
00:34:13And it's the earliest source for Islam that we have.
00:34:18Find out where the Quran was composed.
00:34:21And you find out where Muhammad was operating.
00:34:24And then you get a picture of where Islam might have begun.
00:34:28In the Quran, it tells Muhammad to follow the path trod by Abraham.
00:34:35Maybe that's the place to start looking.
00:34:40I'm in Hebron, which is a town on the West Bank.
00:34:51And I'm currently in Jewish settlement.
00:34:55But Hebron is also very much a Palestinian city.
00:34:59And so the atmosphere is probably as tense as it is anywhere between Israelis and Palestinians.
00:35:05There are Israeli soldiers here with very large guns.
00:35:11And what they're guarding is this, the burial place of Abraham.
00:35:16Abraham, through the line of his son Isaac, was the father of the Jews.
00:35:28When everyone else was still pagan, Abraham worshipped the one true God.
00:35:35And for this, God rewarded him and his descendants with the Promised Land.
00:35:40Part of which, today, goes by the name of Israel.
00:35:44This is the tomb of Abraham.
00:35:50And the reason that the soldiers are here is that these are not the only people who regard him as their ancestor.
00:35:58And they're not the only people who believe that God gave them the Promised Land.
00:36:05On the other side of the grill are Muslims.
00:36:09And they tell a different story.
00:36:11This is the Muslim side.
00:36:25And the reason they revere Abraham is because, as well as Isaac, he had another son.
00:36:32Ishmael, the father of the Arabs.
00:36:35This is the tomb of Abraham that we saw earlier from the Jewish side.
00:36:42But we're now looking at it from the Muslim side.
00:36:47The significance of Abraham and this association that was made between Arabs and Ishmaelites,
00:36:54the children of Ishmael, is actually much older than Islam itself.
00:37:00It remains central to Islam to this day.
00:37:03According to Muslims, Abraham is their prophet.
00:37:07And the religion he founded was not the religion of the Jews, but Islam.
00:37:12And in the Koran, we read that Ishmael helped Abraham to build a house of God at a place called Baqa.
00:37:22Neither the Koran nor any contemporary source actually specifies where Baqa was.
00:37:28But Muslims now would have absolutely no doubt that Baqa is another name for a place deep in the Arabian deserts.
00:37:37Mecca.
00:37:42The holiest city in Islam.
00:37:54The birthplace of Muhammad.
00:37:57This is the largest mosque in the world.
00:38:02At its centre, the Kaaba, the house of God, first built by Abraham and his son Ishmael,
00:38:12on foundations laid by the first man, Adam.
00:38:16It is older and holier than anywhere else in the world.
00:38:28It was in the hills above the city that Muhammad received the first of his revelations from God.
00:38:35These revelations would form the holy book of Islam, the Koran, the very word of God.
00:38:47Mecca is where Muslims believe everything began.
00:38:55The crossroads of faith and history.
00:39:00Surely here then, you would think, we could find solid evidence for Islam's beginnings.
00:39:08But there is a problem.
00:39:13Aside from a single ambiguous mention in the Koran itself,
00:39:19there is no mention of Mecca.
00:39:22Not one.
00:39:24In any datable text for over a hundred years after Muhammad's death.
00:39:31How can we know that Muhammad does come from Mecca?
00:39:40We can't.
00:39:43But on the other hand, if he doesn't come from there,
00:39:46you have to come up with a plausible alternative for where he might have come from.
00:39:50And why would you want to take that on?
00:39:55Why would I take it on?
00:39:58Well, you know, it's what he's starting to do.
00:40:01If things don't fit, you try something else that might fit.
00:40:13Here we go.
00:40:15So this is it?
00:40:16Yes, here we are.
00:40:21In the Koran, the faithful are instructed to pray in the direction of a holy sanctuary.
00:40:27But what it doesn't ever say is that this sanctuary stood at Mecca.
00:40:33And to some archaeologists, a few early mosques suggest something different.
00:40:39We're talking about one of the earliest examples we have of a mosque.
00:40:43And you date a hundred years after Muhammad?
00:40:45Somewhere within a hundred years or so.
00:40:47Because here, as we go into it, you can see...
00:40:49This is it?
00:40:50This is it, yeah.
00:40:51This is the mosque.
00:40:52This is the mosque.
00:40:53This is the mosque.
00:40:56And what you can...
00:40:57It's...
00:40:59What you can see here, we have an apse which is not facing Mecca.
00:41:03It's not facing the south.
00:41:04It's actually facing towards the east, towards the sun rising.
00:41:08This is an example of the time before the direction had actually been preferred towards Mecca.
00:41:16So the implication of that is that at this early stage of Islam, the focus of prayer has not yet been absolutely fixed.
00:41:26The direction of prayer had not been well established yet.
00:41:30So it's a bit like the concrete hasn't yet set.
00:41:33Yeah.
00:41:34It's that you can still play with it, you can still fiddle around with it, you can experiment with it.
00:41:37Very much so.
00:41:38Yeah.
00:41:39Wow.
00:41:43Not a decisive clue, perhaps.
00:41:46But it is suggestive that, even though there are no Muslim sources, there are reports from Christian writers of the time
00:41:53that the Arab conquerors bowed their heads in prayer not in the direction of Mecca, but in a quite different direction.
00:42:01Somewhere...
00:42:03further north.
00:42:14In the Koran,
00:42:17it never actually states that Muhammad lived in Mecca,
00:42:20nor that Mecca was where the first revelations took place.
00:42:26Does the material in the Koran point to Mecca being the setting for God's revelations to Muhammad?
00:42:32No, it doesn't.
00:42:34I mean, there is mention of a sanctuary.
00:42:35There is a sanctuary, for sure.
00:42:38But where is that sanctuary?
00:42:40That's...
00:42:41Of course, we can't tell.
00:42:43It's devilishly difficult to sort of extract what the context might have been from the text itself.
00:42:48In Muslim tradition, the people of Mecca are pagans, worshippers of idols.
00:42:55But in fact,
00:42:57the people the Koran describes have a deep and sophisticated knowledge of the biblical tradition.
00:43:03The Koran retails biblical stories and alludes to biblical stories, not just biblical but also post-biblical developments.
00:43:12All this is clearly known to the audience.
00:43:15It suggests that what we have is a kind of response on the part of, let us say, Muhammad, to the debates that were going on in Christian and Jewish communities.
00:43:25Where they were debating theological issues and questions that come out of the Hebrew Bible and come out of the New Testament.
00:43:34And the Koran seems to be an effort to engage in the discussion.
00:43:39And so there's a strong connection with the late antique religious discourses that were alive throughout the Near East.
00:43:47So, it's obviously not a pagan world we're looking for.
00:43:54The people in the Koran worship a single god.
00:43:58But it then accuses them of praying to beings other than God.
00:44:02And there's something else.
00:44:04The people the Prophet addresses in the Koran are farmers, agriculturalists.
00:44:08But there was no agriculture in Mecca.
00:44:14Mecca does not have an agrarian base.
00:44:17In Mecca it seems to have been quite an arid valley.
00:44:20If Mecca is this barren, infertile place, how is it that in the Koran the opponents of the Prophet are described as keeping cattle and growing olives and vines?
00:44:32Hmm, good question.
00:44:36This is one of the reasons why some scholars feel that the text of the Koran is really plugged into, say, Syria.
00:44:44Because that's where vines and olives grow much further north.
00:44:47Geographical Syria, where you don't find olive trees in Mecca.
00:44:54So, if Mecca wasn't the starting point of Islam, what was?
00:44:58If you're following the clues in the Koran itself, then you're looking for a landscape inhabited by olive-growing Arabs,
00:45:17who have a deep knowledge of the Biblical tradition, but whose worship of a single god might seem to some a little shop-soiled.
00:45:25This is the city of Avdat, in the Negev Desert.
00:45:32Back in the early 7th century, it was an Arab city on the very fringes of the Roman Empire.
00:45:39Nominally Christian, but with hints of a recently pagan past.
00:45:44There can be no doubt that this is a Christian place of worship. There are two crosses on the ceiling.
00:46:00But there's also something very interesting in the corner, which is a bull complete with horns, and the bull is an image that very probably is drawn from much older native Arab pagan traditions.
00:46:13That doesn't mean that the Christians who built this were themselves pagan, but it does mean, I think, that they are giving their monotheism, their belief in a single god, a little bit of pagan colour.
00:46:23And that essentially is the crime that Muhammad, in the Koran, seems to be accusing his opponents of.
00:46:35But Avdat had more than the right religious complexion. It also had agriculture and olives.
00:46:42In the lifetime of Muhammad, all this would have been green. It would have been agricultural fields as far as the eye can see.
00:46:52Archaeology leaves no doubt that there was a sophisticated irrigation system here that really did make the desert bloom.
00:46:58And so while that doesn't mean that this Avdat is the actual spot where the Koran was composed, it does imply, I think, that the region as a whole seems to fit the wider context of the Koran better than somewhere much further south,
00:47:18in the arid region of Mecca.
00:47:28When you read through and through the Koran, what's really striking as compared, say, to the Bible, which is full of allusions to recognisable landscapes that we know,
00:47:40in the Koran, it's an effort to find an allusion to any landscape or natural setting that we could actually pin down.
00:47:49In fact, in the whole of the Koran, there's really only the one exception.
00:47:54A strange hint about where the Koran might actually have come from.
00:48:05We are on the southernmost shores of the Dead Sea between what is now Israel and Jordan.
00:48:15Lot was the nephew of Abraham and he went to settle down in a city called Sodom.
00:48:20And the people of Sodom were notoriously racy.
00:48:28Unsurprisingly, this provoked the wrath of God.
00:48:31He destroyed his city and this is said to be the remains of Sodom where the anger of God was poured down upon it.
00:48:39And the Koran...
00:48:42So also was a lot among those sent by us.
00:48:49Behold, we delivered him and his adherents, all except an old woman who was among those who lagged behind.
00:48:56Then we destroyed the rest.
00:48:58Truly, you pass by their sights by day and by night.
00:49:07But if the people being addressed by the Prophet are passing this place by day and by night...
00:49:13Then what's it doing here?
00:49:17A thousand kilometres from Mecca.
00:49:19A thousand kilometres from Mecca.
00:49:34In terms of someone who is looking for clues...
00:49:36You are very much in the situation of someone who is panning for gold.
00:49:46And I think that this passage is just one little fleck.
00:49:52I mean, there is one possibility, of course, which is that this one fragment originated in this neighbourhood.
00:50:08Perhaps the rest came from elsewhere.
00:50:11But that then begs the question of where all the various component parts of the Koran are coming from.
00:50:18Are they necessarily to be attributed to one person living at one time?
00:50:28Again, when you start asking that question, it's very hard to know how far to push it.
00:50:39It's from the West that this kind of history came up.
00:50:43That it's reason is the ultimate decider and judge of the truth.
00:50:53But what I'm saying is that those are not going to really give you the reason that is logically satisfying.
00:51:00Where do you think the likeliest place of its origin?
00:51:15Well, that I don't know.
00:51:19That I don't know.
00:51:21I don't think I should speculate on that.
00:51:23My greatest fear is that I'm completely wrong.
00:51:33I do sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think I've got it completely wrong.
00:51:38Once the world is reduced to a mechanical world, then all other levels of reality lose their status as being real.
00:51:55And they're relegated to the realm of so-called superstition.
00:52:00And what is not seen is considered not to exist.
00:52:07Trying to track the origins of Islam has been like chasing a mirage.
00:52:20The Arabs conquer half the world.
00:52:27But they don't talk about Muhammad.
00:52:41There's no mention of Mecca.
00:52:42There's no mention of Mecca
00:52:47So what do they do in detective stories?
00:52:51They follow the money
00:52:54Any of these what's what's what's the first?
00:52:58coin that actually mentions the name of here of the Prophet Muhammad on the coins
00:53:04Do any of these coins mentioned Muhammad by name?
00:53:06Yeah, but isn't is the name of is the is the name of the Prophet Muhammad mentioned
00:53:16Every coin tells a story every inscription conveys an idea of power
00:53:21But sometimes what's not on the coin can be just as significant as what is
00:53:27It would it would be nice to see that the earliest coin that mentions Muhammad
00:53:30Has the name of man because it's it's just it's odd that we're 60 years on from the death of
00:53:39Muhammad and no mention of Muhammad
00:53:44For nearly 60 years the rulers of the Arab Empire
00:53:48Didn't put Muhammad on their coins and then they did
00:53:54Maybe
00:53:5660 years was what they needed to work out what the story really was
00:54:02Maybe the issue isn't why Muhammad was not on the coinage at the beginning
00:54:07But how he got there in the end
00:54:10What if I've been asking the wrong question?
00:54:18What if it wasn't Islam that gave birth to the Arab Empire
00:54:22But the Arab Empire that gave birth to Islam
00:54:30The Empire was rich beyond imagining by the mid 680s it stretched from northern Persia to Egypt to North Africa
00:54:40But who had the right to rule it a
00:54:43Vital question on which the Arabs could not agree and
00:54:47And with so much to play for they began to turn upon themselves
00:54:58It's 680
00:55:0150 years on from the death of Muhammad a deadly spiral of rebellion and civil war is
00:55:08threatening the Arab Empire with implosion and
00:55:11And from deep within the Arabian desert a new claimant to the Empire emerges
00:55:19His name abdullah ibn al-zubayya and
00:55:24Ibn al-zubayya
00:55:26Is going to change the game?
00:55:28What 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
00:55:40Ibn al-zubayya it was
00:55:42struck in
00:55:43685 686 so that's more than half a century after the death of Muhammad and it bears a novel and
00:55:49Fateful slogan in the name of God Muhammad is
00:55:54The prophet of God and so here
00:55:57At 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
00:56:05We have it on any inscription any surviving document
00:56:10Ibn al-zubayya had essentially realized what Constantine the first Christian Roman Emperor
00:56:15had realized long before him that it was no good the lord of
00:56:20Unearthly Empire laying claim to the favor of God unless he could absolutely
00:56:25Demonstrate the cast-iron basis on which he was making that claim and
00:56:31Constantine in his attempt to obtain that sanction had turned to the Christian Church
00:56:35But Ibn al-zubayya turns to the figure of Muhammad
00:56:39Now as it happens Ibn al-zubayya loses the civil war he is defeated by a rival warlord who lays claim to the Empire of the Arabs
00:56:53But the discovery that the name of Muhammad can be used to buttress earthly power
00:56:59That is not forgotten
00:57:01The civil war had been a very close-run thing
00:57:13And the victorious warlord Abdel Malik had no intention of ever again
00:57:19Allowing Muhammad's legacy to fall into the hands of a dangerous rival
00:57:26The Romans had known all about religion and power
00:57:29When they had become Christian they had redrawn the map of Jerusalem
00:57:36Now Abdel Malik set about fashioning a holy city of his own
00:57:51God is beautiful
00:57:54The dome of the rock
00:57:56It's the oldest Islamic building in existence
00:58:01In design it was Roman
00:58:03And Abdel Malik was doing something else that was Roman
00:58:07Plugging his dominion into the power of God
00:58:11On the walls there is an unequivocal mission statement
00:58:17Religion in the eyes of God is Islam
00:58:22There are mentions of Muhammad
00:58:25There are mentions of Muhammad
00:58:25Quotations from the Quran
00:58:27At last
00:58:30Something that we can recognise unmistakably as a new religion
00:58:35There's a sense here of something new coming into being
00:58:40There's the sense of the old
00:58:42The Roman style pillars and the mosaics
00:58:45And yet
00:58:46This is clearly not Roman
00:58:49This is clearly not Christian
00:58:51This is the beginning of something
00:58:53Very very potent
00:58:55Harbinger of a spectacular future
00:59:00It was built on the very site of the old Jewish temple
00:59:08Down here the foundation stone of the world
00:59:13The very junction of heaven and earth
00:59:16This is quite possibly one of the most awesome places on the entire planet
00:59:37It is deeply, deeply holy
00:59:40Not to one but to two great religions
00:59:42It's the place where Jews believe
00:59:45God inhabits on earth
00:59:47The holy of holies, the Shekinah
00:59:49And to Muslims it is the cave
00:59:52That Muhammad prayed in after being brought here from Mecca
00:59:56Before he ascended to heaven
00:59:58To be confirmed as the sin of the prophets
01:00:01So in religious terms this is like a sort of nuclear reactor
01:00:06Firing out isotopes of power
01:00:10It's certainly a very grand statement
01:00:18That we Muslims have superseded you Jews
01:00:21And we have superseded you Christians
01:00:23By being filled with inscriptions
01:00:25Directed against Christian trinitarian beliefs
01:00:28So it's Muslims saying
01:00:32We are here, we've come to stay
01:00:34And we are the winners
01:00:34Abdul Malik now rules his empire as the deputy of God
01:00:41Just as the Christian Roman emperors had done
01:00:44And like the Roman emperors
01:00:46He has built a house of God in Jerusalem
01:00:48But Abdul Malik, lord of Jerusalem though he is
01:00:54Is also an Arab
01:00:56Perhaps for Arabs
01:01:00Jerusalem for all its ancient and unrivaled potency
01:01:04Owe too much to the Jews and Christians
01:01:08To stand alone as the holy city of the new Arab empire
01:01:13A poet at Abdul Malik's court
01:01:20Describes him as the lord of two houses sacred to God
01:01:24One in Jerusalem
01:01:26And one
01:01:28Well
01:01:29He doesn't say where it is
01:01:32And for 100 years after the death of Mohammed
01:01:36No one says where it is
01:01:39All sources go on calling it
01:01:50A place in the desert
01:01:52It's a sanctuary in the desert
01:01:54Without giving it a name
01:01:56And at some point
01:01:59This sanctuary must have been fixed at Mecca
01:02:02In the middle of the desert
01:02:04But why?
01:02:05The truth of the matter is
01:02:08We don't know what was
01:02:10The true religion of the first Arab conquerors
01:02:14It's an Arab story
01:02:17Arabs come from the desert
01:02:19God is speaking to the Arabs
01:02:21They don't want Jews or Christians
01:02:23Having any influence on Mohammed
01:02:25The Quran is in Arabic
01:02:38The Quran is full of characters from the Bible
01:02:40But if the book came out of the desert
01:02:42How did these characters get there?
01:02:47We have nothing
01:02:48We have this one book out of nothing
01:02:50We don't have the key that can unlock the tradition
01:02:53But maybe that's the point
01:02:56We're not supposed to unlock the tradition
01:02:59God's message comes to a prophet
01:03:01The prophet lives in a desert
01:03:03There is no room for anyone else
01:03:06It's remote
01:03:09It's remote
01:03:11It's uncontaminated
01:03:13It's pure
01:03:13It's a place where we can rule out
01:03:17That Mohammed got his ideas from others than God
01:03:20It's interesting that this rationalistic history
01:03:39Is very weak
01:03:41In being able to provide causes for certain effects
01:03:47Not being able to know something
01:03:53Is no proof that it doesn't exist
01:03:56You begin by looking in the record
01:04:00And all you find is emptiness
01:04:02And you end up in the desert
01:04:04And all you see is emptiness
01:04:06But perhaps the emptiness is the answer
01:04:11Maybe Mecca gave Islam
01:04:13What it most needed
01:04:16A blank sheet
01:04:18Where Muslims could put their profit
01:04:22Beyond the reach of history
01:04:26Any means have mercy
01:04:33I love you
01:04:34The quotes in the words
01:04:38Sun
01:04:47Professor, do you think that what I am doing
01:05:01is complicit with the brute fact of Western imperialism,
01:05:07Western hegemony?
01:05:09No, not necessarily.
01:05:11As long as you remain aware of what you're doing.
01:05:15If you come as a Western scholar or historian,
01:05:19and in all honesty, present what your worldview is,
01:05:23and let's say when I look at the Islamic world from this paradigm,
01:05:28this is what I see,
01:05:31and bring out why this is different from how Muslims see themselves,
01:05:36that I think is a very honest effort.
01:05:38And it's a good effort.
01:05:41But if you try to act as a doctor to a child,
01:05:44take this medicine, it's good for you,
01:05:45you don't know you're eating the wrong thing,
01:05:48this is how it should be,
01:05:49that's where the problem begins.
01:05:51And the Muslim world is not going to accept that.
01:05:55The days when the British would bring scholars from England
01:05:58to teach Indians how to be Hindus and Muslims,
01:06:02it's finished.
01:06:04It's finished.
01:06:08It's true, before I began,
01:06:10and I did have preconceptions.
01:06:14I was brought up a Christian.
01:06:18But I was also brought up an environment that questions everything.
01:06:23Studying ancient history is a process of paint stripping.
01:06:29Tearing away stories that you want to believe the literal truth of.
01:06:32This is supposed to be Mount Sinai,
01:06:37where Moses saw the burning bush,
01:06:40where God gave him the Ten Commandments.
01:06:44But there's no historical evidence for any of this.
01:06:49Christian monastery,
01:06:51Roman fortifications,
01:06:54the old partnership,
01:06:55God and empire.
01:06:56Between them,
01:06:59they turned this place into Sinai.
01:07:03In my heart,
01:07:04I want to believe it,
01:07:06but my head won't let me.
01:07:11We believed that there was a living tradition
01:07:13kept by the people here,
01:07:15that this is where God had revealed himself
01:07:17in an extraordinary way.
01:07:19How much would it matter
01:07:20if it turned out that this wasn't
01:07:22the place where Moses had received the Ten Commandments?
01:07:25But the spiritual encounter with God
01:07:28is more important.
01:07:31The reality is there,
01:07:34even if your eyes aren't open
01:07:35to see things in actuality.
01:07:38God is always present,
01:07:40but you're not aware of his presence.
01:07:44Ultimately, the city of God matters more
01:07:45than the city of man.
01:07:47Yes.
01:07:48But as a historian,
01:07:56I have to presume that the city of God
01:07:58was built by man as well.
01:08:03I wanted to map the human past
01:08:05in human terms,
01:08:09to make a map that fits the facts.
01:08:12But I travelled to places
01:08:17where the maps revealed
01:08:18a heavenly plan,
01:08:22sacred lands,
01:08:25sacred places.
01:08:33A world where you don't have to believe in God
01:08:36to feel the power of God.
01:08:38This is the promised land.
01:08:51Some call it Israel,
01:08:52some call it Palestine.
01:08:55A land where Muslims,
01:08:57Christians and Jews
01:08:59still fight over the story
01:09:01of a promise made by God to Abraham
01:09:03thousands of years ago.
01:09:05Was there really a promise?
01:09:11It's not for the historian to say.
01:09:15But the world believers make
01:09:17in the name of God,
01:09:19that is what history is about.
01:09:21Even today,
01:09:23more people die for visions of heaven
01:09:25than they ever do for historical facts.
01:09:29Stories that never happened
01:09:30can be infinitely more powerful
01:09:33than stories that did.
01:09:35I set out to write the story
01:09:43of the beginnings of Islam.
01:09:46If you're a Muslim,
01:09:47then there's no problem.
01:09:49Everything is explained by God.
01:09:52But I'm not a Muslim.
01:09:54And I don't think that civilizations
01:09:56appear like lightning
01:09:57from a clear blue sky.
01:10:00What I think now
01:10:01is that Islam emerged
01:10:03from a whole range of circumstances.
01:10:06From the religions
01:10:07and the empires
01:10:08and the convulsions of the world
01:10:10that witnessed its birth.
01:10:14And yes, of course,
01:10:15it is still the case.
01:10:17The black hole
01:10:18that surrounds Islam's beginnings
01:10:19doesn't give up its secrets easily.
01:10:22But maybe we are getting somewhere.
01:10:29The search for the historical Muhammad,
01:10:31for the origins of the Quran,
01:10:33for the whereabouts
01:10:35of the first century,
01:10:36for the way Islam evolved
01:10:39out of the Arab empire.
01:10:43These are pieces
01:10:44of a whole new story.
01:11:01Tomorrow night,
01:11:02the wait is over.
01:11:03The Paralympic Games opening ceremony
01:11:05kicks off at eight.
01:11:06It's shrouded in secrecy,
01:11:08but I can tell you
01:11:08in all probability
01:11:09it won't feature Timothy Spall
01:11:11in a hat like the other one.
01:11:12Next tonight,
01:11:13two houses
01:11:14and five garages
01:11:15were full of stuff
01:11:16six months down the line.
01:11:17How's the big clean-out
01:11:19coming along?
01:11:19Catch up
01:11:20with the obsessive compulsive hoarder.
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