The history of Islam is not off-limits

I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’

It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots of the presenter doing strangely unconnected things (travelling on an elevator, sitting on a bed etc.)

But Holland was an engaging and pleasant presenter, and the documentary was something of a landmark in that it finally brought to wider public attention a subject which has been almost completely off-limits in recent years. Because of violence and the threat of violence against scholars, there has been a great unwillingness, even in Western countries, to investigate the origins of Islam in the same historical manner in which other religions are treated. As a result the general public might be forgiven for assuming that Ernst Renan was right in his infamously ill-informed 1851 claim that Islam was different from the other religions because its origins were not ‘covered’ but ‘born in the full light of history.’

As Holland showed, this is not the case: the early years of Islam were distinctly murky. But the scholarship is in its comparative infancy, perhaps only now at the phase the critical methods applied to Christianity were at when Eichhorn was alive. Nevertheless, scholars like IAS‘s Patricia Crone are working away at separating the un-provable religious claims from the provable historical ones.

The problem such scholarship has had in recent years was however still on display in Holland’s programme. That is censorship, self-censorship and a combination of the two.