In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
A thrillingly panoramic historical account of the rise of Islam, hailed as “a veritable tour de force” (The Wall Street Journal), from the acclaimed author of Rubicon and co-host of the hit podcast The Rest Is History
“Accessible but delightful . . . as fun to read as any thriller, and with far richer intellectual nutritional content.”—The Daily Beast
Written with verve and panache, In the Shadow of the Sword recounts the history of how the ancient world came to an end and how a new power, Islam, arose. In a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement, Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization, aspects of which endure to the present day. With profound implications for the most consequential events of our time, Holland bears witness to the abiding impact of this extraordinary, convulsive age.
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Community Reviews
Pro
It's… okay.
First the good part. There is A LOT of good stuff here. A ton of amazing info and this book has some unique and amazing stories about Muslims, the Quran and the Middle East. This book is more direct about what we get to hear than basically all other modern books on this topic. It's nearly always a topic where people are holding back and mainly focus on the positive story. While this book just tells the story outright. Half positive, half showing some of the less positive things. It's brutal and direct. I think especially Muslims will love this directness about their old history.
There is just a bunch of history here and it's not biased, ideological or partial. Which means I'd be glad if everyone read it. If you are Muslim, Arab or interested in Islam then this is a must-read for sure. But it's macro history so bring your brain along. It's very hard to remember some of the connections and names. And the geography part of it is completely confusing.
Con
It's not really among my favorite history books unfortunately. It has nearly everything I crave for. Great history, detailed stories, direct retellings and no bias. But unfortunately the audiobook I had had several issues in how the info was presented. The book is already way over the top artistic and poetic. If you love poetry you will absolutely adore this book. If you are a man like me who doesn't really see any deepness to regular poems this may be largely a miss. I constantly zoned out during this audiobook. I do tend to do that a lot as I likely have ADHD or something. But it's really up to that author to entertain readers. I can concentrate with some books so it's not 100% my fault here. The thing that really did me in was how the narrator also chose to narrate the poetic style in a poetic way. Over the top narration with focus on single words and sentences. Narrator's initials are JK. I never felt like the narrator cared or understood the stories themselves. He constantly wanted to sound deep and engaging while it came off as obnoxious and irritating. Why do single words need to be loudly spoken? Instead I want focus on sentences and paragraphs. The narration made the poetic style twice as noticeable which for sure will make people who don't like poems, like myself, lose focus at times.
It's just not really possible for me to ignore this part of the book even though the history is good. The history itself is also making it very hard to understand. It's not really telling us when or what happened but rather it's a book using the real stories as a way to narrate a poem. So I'm constantly confused about events, locations and dates. All stories are meant to be epics while what I really needed was context. I need to learn about Arab history. I can't enjoy it if I don't get it. This sort of epic storytelling would be good for my own country that I already know much about.
The history is so disjointed that it's basically a ton of stories one after another and not one retelling. 2/3 of the book is not about Arabia but about Jews and Rome which is stuff I didn't seek info on right now so I largely ignored those parts. Then in the Muslim part you get even more disjointed stories with too little macro perspective. Not really sure what the goal was here but I for sure need a macro perspective before reading such books. I think most people do.
On audiobook this is just a miss for me. I'm sure I'd love the written book much more. But I pick the audiobook over the book 9/10 times as I already have 300 books I need to read that are not even in audio format so I can't add needlessly more to that pile.
I would say that unless you are an Arab with deep knowledge on Arab culture this may be a book that goes over your head. For me it for sure was. I missed most of the stories and dates because I just had no chance in hell at following poetic stories about events I wasn't that knowledgeable on. If I read 3-4 books about old Islam and then read this book I think it would have been a much better read. But I decided to start with this which is a mistake. You just need to read a bit in the book to understand what I mean. Even stories I knew about were presented in such a clunky way that I felt like the author was being needlessly complicated. Wikipedia articles are just better intros to this stuff by far.
Conclusion
On audiobook it's largely a miss but for sure not something I regret reading or am irritated about. It's still a ton of good stories. And I do feel like the macro understanding here is amazing. He understands Islam and religion better than most intellectuals out there and he is just spot on on all his ideas and assumptions. This is pure history with no bullshit.
You probably need to have a ton of knowledge on Islam and Arabia to understand and enjoy it fully. But I assume that the written book may be more accessible. Up to you to check it out. I think the right people will adore this book. It's not bad by any means. It's just not how I like to read history.
It's… okay.
First the good part. There is A LOT of good stuff here. A ton of amazing info and this book has some unique and amazing stories about Muslims, the Quran and the Middle East. This book is more direct about what we get to hear than basically all other modern books on this topic. It's nearly always a topic where people are holding back and mainly focus on the positive story. While this book just tells the story outright. Half positive, half showing some of the less positive things. It's brutal and direct. I think especially Muslims will love this directness about their old history.
There is just a bunch of history here and it's not biased, ideological or partial. Which means I'd be glad if everyone read it. If you are Muslim, Arab or interested in Islam then this is a must-read for sure. But it's macro history so bring your brain along. It's very hard to remember some of the connections and names. And the geography part of it is completely confusing.
Con
It's not really among my favorite history books unfortunately. It has nearly everything I crave for. Great history, detailed stories, direct retellings and no bias. But unfortunately the audiobook I had had several issues in how the info was presented. The book is already way over the top artistic and poetic. If you love poetry you will absolutely adore this book. If you are a man like me who doesn't really see any deepness to regular poems this may be largely a miss. I constantly zoned out during this audiobook. I do tend to do that a lot as I likely have ADHD or something. But it's really up to that author to entertain readers. I can concentrate with some books so it's not 100% my fault here. The thing that really did me in was how the narrator also chose to narrate the poetic style in a poetic way. Over the top narration with focus on single words and sentences. Narrator's initials are JK. I never felt like the narrator cared or understood the stories themselves. He constantly wanted to sound deep and engaging while it came off as obnoxious and irritating. Why do single words need to be loudly spoken? Instead I want focus on sentences and paragraphs. The narration made the poetic style twice as noticeable which for sure will make people who don't like poems, like myself, lose focus at times.
It's just not really possible for me to ignore this part of the book even though the history is good. The history itself is also making it very hard to understand. It's not really telling us when or what happened but rather it's a book using the real stories as a way to narrate a poem. So I'm constantly confused about events, locations and dates. All stories are meant to be epics while what I really needed was context. I need to learn about Arab history. I can't enjoy it if I don't get it. This sort of epic storytelling would be good for my own country that I already know much about.
The history is so disjointed that it's basically a ton of stories one after another and not one retelling. 2/3 of the book is not about Arabia but about Jews and Rome which is stuff I didn't seek info on right now so I largely ignored those parts. Then in the Muslim part you get even more disjointed stories with too little macro perspective. Not really sure what the goal was here but I for sure need a macro perspective before reading such books. I think most people do.
On audiobook this is just a miss for me. I'm sure I'd love the written book much more. But I pick the audiobook over the book 9/10 times as I already have 300 books I need to read that are not even in audio format so I can't add needlessly more to that pile.
I would say that unless you are an Arab with deep knowledge on Arab culture this may be a book that goes over your head. For me it for sure was. I missed most of the stories and dates because I just had no chance in hell at following poetic stories about events I wasn't that knowledgeable on. If I read 3-4 books about old Islam and then read this book I think it would have been a much better read. But I decided to start with this which is a mistake. You just need to read a bit in the book to understand what I mean. Even stories I knew about were presented in such a clunky way that I felt like the author was being needlessly complicated. Wikipedia articles are just better intros to this stuff by far.
Conclusion
On audiobook it's largely a miss but for sure not something I regret reading or am irritated about. It's still a ton of good stories. And I do feel like the macro understanding here is amazing. He understands Islam and religion better than most intellectuals out there and he is just spot on on all his ideas and assumptions. This is pure history with no bullshit.
You probably need to have a ton of knowledge on Islam and Arabia to understand and enjoy it fully. But I assume that the written book may be more accessible. Up to you to check it out. I think the right people will adore this book. It's not bad by any means. It's just not how I like to read history.
I bailed on this, the writing is very good, but the author makes a lot of statements that he didn't back up with any evidence, and I don't think good non-fiction books make such sweeping statements without a lot of evidence. I read more of this book than I normally for a book that didn't provide enough citations just because the writing was so well done. I wanted to keep reading it, but even when I tried to look at his notes and bibliography, I didn't see anything that justified what some of his statements were. As an example, claiming that the Christian mind is "hard wired" to question the literal nature of the Bible (meaning that it's acknowledged that it was written not by God, Christ, and/or his apostles) seems outrageous not just because I live in the USA where fundamentalism is prevalent, but also because I'm pretty sure that there is a LOT of ink on this very critical topic to the authors point that goes back for hundreds of years. I'm not a biblical scholar, so maybe he's right, but the author really needs to provide me with lots of citations to back a statement like that up. I will have to look elsewhere for a history of this region.
The lovely writing is why this gets 2 stars. I wish I could finish it because the writing is so good, but I just can't handle the way the author seems to skip over evidence for major concepts. I acknowledge that it might be that I need to read a LOT more on the history of Christian theology and biblical history before I know if the author is writing based on some famous theory I don't know about, but as this was NOT billed as an advanced historical treatise, I don't think it's unfair to ask for citations, especially for a concept that seems really sweeping in nature.
The lovely writing is why this gets 2 stars. I wish I could finish it because the writing is so good, but I just can't handle the way the author seems to skip over evidence for major concepts. I acknowledge that it might be that I need to read a LOT more on the history of Christian theology and biblical history before I know if the author is writing based on some famous theory I don't know about, but as this was NOT billed as an advanced historical treatise, I don't think it's unfair to ask for citations, especially for a concept that seems really sweeping in nature.
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