In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

Muslim commentators invariably equated the phrase “the Trustworthy Spirit” with the angel Gabriel—but the Qur’an never actually states that the Prophet received his revelations from Gabriel. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the much later tradition that Muhammad was addressed by an angel over the course of his prophetic career, visions of light and supernatural voices are notable by their absence from the Qur’an. As Uri Rubin (1995) has argued, “the basic tale of Muhammad’s first revelations accords with biblical rather than quranic conventions, and the story was initially designed to meet apologetic needs” (p. 109).

56 For more on this, and other parallels between the Greek and Qur’anic notions of paradise, see the brilliant online article by Saleh. As he points out (p. 54)—albeit possibly with tongue in cheek—the very word used in the Qur’an to signify the heavenly maidens—hur—has an echo of Hera’s name.

44 Qur’an: 9.29. The precise meaning of this verse is notoriously problematic. For a sample of the various attempts to make sense of it, see Ibn Warraq (2002), pp. 319–86.

34 For a detailed analysis of the strikingly precise correspondences between the two stories, see Van Bladel, pp. 180–3. As he conclusively demonstrates, “they relate the same story in precisely the same order of events using many of the same particular details” (p. 182).

26 For a detailed and intellectually thrilling exposition of this point, see The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam by Gerald Hawting: a ground-breaking work that has resulted in a paradigm shift in the way that scholars understand the role of the Mushrikun in the Qur’an.

13 Most striking of all is the absence of any mention of Mecca in Procopius, since in one passage of The History of the Wars (1.19), the historian provides a remarkably detailed survey of the western coast of Arabia. This is testimony to the range and depth of Roman knowledge of the peninsula, and to the seeming lack of any Meccan sphere of influence.

8 This has been most radically argued by Günter Lüling, who proposes that the Meccans were largely Christian, and that the original core of the Qur’an consisted of Christian hymns. For the suggestion that Jews had settled in Mecca, and powerfully influenced Muhammad, see Torrey.

7 This suggestion has its roots in traditions that are even older than the first Muslim biographies of the Prophet. A Christian chronicler, Jacob of Edessa, for instance, writing at the end of the seventh century, referred to him as going “for trade to the lands of Palestine, Arabia and Syrian Phoenicia” (quoted by Hoyland (1997), p. 165).

As early as the second century AD, pagans across the Roman Empire were interpreting the gods of their various pantheons as the angels of one supreme deity, and by late antiquity this process had become near universal. For a useful survey, see Crone (2010), pp. 185–8.

We now know that the sixth-century pestilence was humanity’s first experience of bubonic plague, so it is probable—indeed, almost certain—that its impact (upon a population that had no immunity whatsoever) was even greater than that of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.