Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword

Just copied from another thread. I think this may make for an interesting discussion:
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Varielle>

(Tom Holland) was interviewed on NPR today about his new book about Mohammed. Be back in a mo when I remember the title...

Aha! In the Shadow of the Sword. Here's the link to the story. http://www.npr.org/books/titles/153988701/in-the-shadow-of-the-sword-the-birth-o....

I was concerned that some of the things he said might earn him Salman Rushdie type threats.

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shikari:>

Still, Rushdie's fatwa was really a response to his thinly-veiled attack on Khomeini in the Satanic Verses. And he was a Muslim. We'll have to see.

Interesting is Glen Bowersock's criticism of the genesis of Islam section (which is hardly the entire focus of the book, BTW, being just as focussed on the Christian Roman empire and the Sasanian Empire as in early Islam, from what I've seen). Here's Bowersock's review and Holland's response.:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/04/in-shadow-of-sword-tom-holland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/07/tom-holland-responds-glen-bowersock

But I've not read the book yet, though I do have it at my feet as I write. More when I have.

I'll be interested to see what you think when you read it! I enjoyed his Rubicon immensely.

Given that Naguib Mahfouz earned an assassination attempt over his Children of Gebelawi, it doesn't take much... That book is, to me, quite positive about all the religions involved, and I have a difficult time understanding how anyone could feel so strongly about it as to want to murder the author.

I'm currently reading his Forge of Christendom and fully intend to read In the Shadow of the Sword next. I'll be interested to see how he treats Islam, because if I'm honest one of my favorite aspects of Persian Fire and, to a lesser extent I suppose, Rubicon, was how Holland would make sort of tongue-in-cheek comments about the religions (or cultures) in question in the guise of one if its adherents. I've been a bit disappointed so far in Forge of Christendom as I'm about 100pgs in and he hasn't done any of this yet...

I wondered what you were talking about, Feicht, but now it's clear. We've yet another UK/US title difference. Your US Forge of Christendom is the UK's Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. Bloody publishers!

Yeah! Sorry about that, I guess I should have listed both titles. I hate it when publishers inexplicably give the book a different name in the US than in the UK. I've noticed the same thing tends to happen with Adrian Goldsworthy's books.

I'm curious why they do it; it must be a marketing thing or something. That or they are hoping to catch unwitting bibliophiles unawares and have them buy the same book twice...

I hadn't noticed that with regard to Goldsworthy, Feicht, but Hugh Kennedy's books also suffer from the condition.

The key difference is getting all the key words into the title. While British titles are often playful, the idiot-proof US titles refuse the risk of an in-store misplacement or not appearing in the search results.

Fair enough. I could definitely see Barnes and Noble stocking a book called "Millenium" in an unintended location :-P

I did find "Forge" a bit more of a slog than Rubicon, and maybe that's why. It was less funny, but I also had difficulty keeping all the players straight in my head.

Got In the Shadow of the Sword for Father's Day. In the TBR pile. Will report back

>9 Cynara:: Cynara, I've finally finished "Forge". I intend to write a full review later, but for now I'll just throw out a few thoughts. To start, you're right that there were far fewer of the tongue-in-cheek jabs that are some of my favorite parts of Holland's other books. Perhaps this is because of the subject matter; unlike in Persian Fire where he can cleverly portray the silliness of Athenians actually believing that that gigantic woman being paraded through the streets is truly their patron goddess, when he's dealing with Christianity, he may have believed that he couldn't be too hard on it, given that the lion's share of his readership will statistically adhere to the faith. I don't know offhand if Holland himself is a practicing Christian, but his (somewhat disturbing, to me) lack of irreverence towards it is quite remarkable, given some of the characters he has to work with. I kept waiting for the big knockout blow, thinking he had been holding back long enough that soon, surely, a great Holland-esque jab would come. But by and large, I felt he kind of left me hanging in this regard. Whereas it is his typical modus operandi to present events in his books as if he were one of the "believers" himself (it's hard for me to describe this, but if you've read his books before, you know what I mean), whether Zoroastrianism or, in this case, Christianity, in "Forge", I never really got any of the--what I regard as typical in his books--lifting of the curtain with a wink; when in "Forge" he speaks of saints and miracles, visions and divine plagues, you never really get any indication that he himself doesn't believe in this stuff. When it's something about dragons, it's clear enough to infer where he stands, but with the other stuff, you have to wonder. He seldom (if ever) spoke of miraculous things "rumored" to have happened, instead just stating that they did. Maybe all this was simply to set up the last line of the book, where he reveals that Antichrist did not, in fact, appear on earth after the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, as everyone thought he would. But since everyone pretty much knows already that this didn't happen, if that were his setup, I wish he'd gone another route.

All that being said, it was still an enjoyable book. As you say, Cynara, keeping track of all the names is absolutely maddening, especially when so many of them changed their damned names after accession to the throne. But if you're reading just for general narrative, it's not too bad. I definitely read about some of this stuff for the first time ever, so that was interesting; for a lot of the events/characters in this book, I already knew the historical result, but not the initial circumstances. For instance, I knew Olaf Trygvasson christianized Norway, but that was about all I knew. For all the various French and German kings, the situation was similar.

For me though, the flat-out best part of the whole book was everything surrounding the "Knightmare" section of the "...Yielding Place to New" chapter. I had already known (peripherally) how knights and castles weren't necessarily as romantic and glorious as popularly believed, but seeing it spelled out exactly how horrifying it was was quite eye-opening, to say the least.

Anyway, all told, having just finished The Forge of Christendom, I think I'd give it a solid "3.5/5" at the moment... although to be fair, the somewhat lower score could also be simply because the book is a bit outside my "area of expertise." I would definitely not turn anyone away from reading it, but would just advise that they are aware of what I wrote above beforehand.

Feicht, that's an interesting thought on the possible reasons for Holland's greater, hm, sense of gravity in this book. The "Christendom" angle seems to be foregrounded in some of the titles (my Canadian edition is entitled Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom but others are entitled The Forge of Christendom or The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West). I don't know why that would inhibit him; how many readers would the books lose if they took a few shots at Edward the Confessor? I suppose some people have no sense of humour.

I was also struck by the "Knightmare" section - the "thugs on horses" aspect of knighthood was brought home sharply, and his characterization of castles as fortified outposts that facilitated feudal control of the surrounding villagers (as opposed to invading armies) was a new perspective for me.

More generally, I was interested in the ginger relationship between the secular and religious authorities - how in some decades they sought each other for legitimation and power, and in other decades darted quick glances at the door and found a reason to leave. That, and the bits on the corsairs & Normans. There wasn't much humour, but I found some of the civilizing-the-Vikings bits very funny (keep the land you conquered, we'll call you a duke, and you convert to Christianity. Hokay? Now stay there. Please?).

I'm not very well informed about this period in Europe (or anywhere else, to be honest), so the more I read the more I felt adrift in a sea of multi-named dynasts. Which one was Otto again? Or is this his son? (Etc.) Ideally, I'd reread it with a few family trees at hand, but I don't think I'll be that organized.

I didn't think readers would be turned off by individual characters (of whom, I would imagine, the majority are nothing more than names anyway) being lightly ridiculed necessarily, but rather some of the concepts of Christianity that seem silly and mockable to me, but maybe not to others. For instance, basically whenever Holland mentioned people having visions in which a saint or something appeared to them, he seems to discuss it as if it were legit, and not the kind of thing that would make you think someone were crazy if they claimed it happened to them nowadays. This, to me, stood in contrast to his other books, where he would present this kind of thing in a way which you could tell he thought it was silly, even if he didn't straight up say it; my favorite example, mentioned above, is the scene in Persian Fire where they parade "Athena" through the streets of Athens, when it's obvious that they just nabbed some gargantuan woman and dressed her up for political purposes. I feel like Holland never really explored these kind of "ulterior motives" in The Forge of Christendom, which is kind of a shame. So to me it either means: when Jesus "appears" to a cleric in an abbey (I think it was Cluny), either 1) Holland believes that this actually happened, 2) he thinks it is silly enough to not even need further explanation, or 3) he was afraid to do more than present it as reported, given the (at least, alleged) place of reverence Christianity still has in western society. With this in mind, I'll be interested to see how he treats the subject matter in In the Shadow of the Sword, because for whatever reason, the parts of "Forge" where he introduced the Saracens et. al. struck me as a lot more similar to his treatment of religion in his other works and, as I said, I only wish he had done the same with... well... the rest of the book. On the other hand, I could see how that could anger a lot of people (if not MORE than with Christianity, then more than likely provoking a fiercer scorn, if anything).

I think I'll read the Islam book first. Early origins always especially fascinate me.