1,400 years ago, armies of nomads sprung from the Arabian desert
and conquered half the world.
Today, their descendants tell an extraordinary story.
They say God sent them a prophet, Mohammed.
And then God gave them given an empire.
But is this the truth? Not everyone is so sure.
The Muslim conquests are among the most decisive events in history.
But were the Arabs, in the 7th century, really Muslims?
My name is Tom Holland.
I am a historian. I write about ancient empires,
the Persian, Greek and Roman empires.
Now I want to write about the most influential of all ancient empires,
the empire founded by the Arabs in the 7th century,
the empire that gave us Islam.
I thought it would be relatively easy.
They say that Islam was born in the bright light of history.
But when I started to work on the project,
I discovered that it was, in fact, not the case at all.
Regarding the beginnings of Islam, there is no bright light of history.
Only a kind of darkness.
And when you start to dig, nothing really seems certain.
From the start I felt as if sucked into a black hole.
The problem with writing about the history of the emergence of Islam,
is that we have a lack of evidence.
We have nothing on what base ourselves to tell the story.
I expected to find testimonials of Muslims from the 7th century.
But there is nothing.
I can't find anything.
There is a real problem here.
You delve into the origins of deep beliefs of Muslims,
but where is the historical evidence?
Sometimes the believer's belief,
and the understanding of the scholar, cannot be reconciled.
It's a choice between working on history and not working on the story.
So I'm working on the story, even though it can hurt people.
Things have to be said which believers do not say.
Things that, sometimes, shock believers.
Things that sometimes make them very angry.
You could say it's a detective story
Why do most clues seem to be missing?
When the Romans conquered Middle East they left behind
all kinds of evidence - stories, inscriptions, pieces.
But with the Muslim conquest: Nothing.
What can we really say on Mohammed?
What do we really know on the origins of Islam?
Where to start ?
Well maybe we should beginning at the beginning of the 7th century.
It's five minutes to midnight,
and the old world is about to to change forever.
We are in Istanbul.
In 632, it was Constantinople.
For 300 years, the capital of the Roman Empire.
A Christian city at the heart of a Christian world.
A universal religion for a universal empire.
It was the Roman recipe for power.
An idea fully appreciated by Muslims when,
almost 1000 years later, they conquered the city,
and transformed the largest cathedral of Christianity into a mosque.
We know how and when the Romans became Christians
because contemporaries tell us all this.
But what we don't know is how the Arabs became Muslims.
Take a trip into the past
and you can't be sure of where you will arrive.
History is like a labyrinth.
Once you're inside, who knows where this will take you?
So here we are - the Grand Palace Roman emperors
of Christian Constantinople.
Strange to think that, at the beginning of the 7th century,
when Mohammed was still alive,
it truly was the center of the world.
What atrocious poetry to consider that everything you see here,
is nothing more than rubble.
Because it's something which was broken into a thousand pieces,
which barely keeps a tiny trace
of what was, at the time,
the center of the greatest power of the planet.
It's the White House, this is where the emperor lives,
it's the Pentagon, it's the heart of the defense system,
it is the Supreme Court - where the laws are drafted, made and delivered,
all this in this place which dominates Constantinople,
the city of Constantine, the first Christian empire,
the grandest city in the world.
And now there's nothing left. It's in the average person's backyard.
You have the road on one side, you have each other's train.
And the only thing to see is a cat.
In 630, the Roman Empire had just defeated
the worst crisis in its history.
His lifelong enemies, the Persians, had invaded its most beautiful provinces.
The Persian troops had reached the walls of Constantinople itself.
Then, after 25 years of war, the Persians were defeated.
The Roman emperor was, once again, the master of the universe.
At such a time, how could he have conceived the idea
of the ruin that the heavens had in store for him?
Professor, does someone like me,
who is not Muslim,
and who does not believe that God spoke to Mohammed,
can hope to find the truth on the origins of Islam?
No.
The Arabs
Yes, they were indeed the Arabs
The Prophet Mohammed
was an Arab, like us
A Bedouin. The face of the Arab conquest.
The shock troops, who in the 7th century, arose outside Arabia,
and forged a colossal empire, spanning half the world.
And here, in the desert,
no one doubts that the conquerors were indeed Muslims.
The prophet and his friends gave up everything,
they didn't care valuable things,
property or even their children,
they didn't care the risk of being killed,
or die of hunger, or get lost,
Everything was for Islam.
That's what they say today,
victories, conquest, the empire.
But how can we know that Islam existed at the time?
It all started with the Prophet This is what we live for today...
We Muslims are their descendants
We are their descendants
For the ancients, the Arabs were notorious savages.
Of all the peoples of the earth, the most despised and insignificant.
However, after ten years in the first half of the 7th century,
they had taken from the Roman Empire its richest provinces,
crushed the Persian Empire,
and took possession of the majority in the Middle East.
A stunning achievement.
For most Muslims, a miracle.
Only God could have done this.
The Arab Bedouins...
they were on the fringes of history during the Roman Empire.
The fact that thanks to such a people, all of North Africa and Spain
could have been transformed in just a few decades,
and a whole new civilization created in less than a century,
from China to France...
It is a historical fact.
And it all began, the story goes,
when a merchant named Mohammed, in a cave in the mountain,
heard something so terrifying how grandiose, the voice of an angel.
“O Muhammad, you are the apostle of God.”
God had spoken to the Arabs.
The message was also clear that it was simple.
There is only one God.
Mohammed is the prophet of God.
Islam is submission to God.
And this is this message who gave them an empire.
Or was it something else?
No one doubts that the conquests really took place,
but the question is: Was it thanks to Islam?
If you were a Christian or a Jew or a follower of another religion,
for whom a similar reality exists,
it would be easier for you to believe it.
There is an Arabic proverb very famous who says,
"Not being able to know something,
is not proof that it doesn’t exist.”
But believe it, take the leap of faith,
is not as easy as it seems.
In Western universities, historical research is based
about skepticism, about doubt.
And just like the generations precedents of scholars
shined the spotlight on the life of Jesus,
now some are throwing a new one radical look at the life of Mohammed.
Patricia Crone is professor at Princeton,
she was part of a a number of historians
including research on the roots of Islam
strongly divided the world proto-Islamic studies.
"You cannot reject Muslim history", she writes,
"but you can't accept it, either."
The only solution is to get out outside the Islamic tradition,"
"and start all the historical work again."
There is a veil, in what concerns Mohammed,
and you can't see behind.
What do we know about him and his life?
Ah, well we know it existed,
we know he was active somewhere in Arabia,
we know it is associated with the book, the Koran,
that he was the one who recited it,
but that doesn't tell us what really happened,
which is, of course, what a historian would like to rebuild.
We have a lack of evidence.
We have the Quran,
but we cannot account for History on the sole basis of the Koran
We have different sources non-Muslims from the beginnings of Islam.
They are insufficient to write history.
We have nothing, we have this book came out of... out of nothing.
It's total darkness.
But here, that's not the way how they see things.
The Bedouins think that they know everything about Mohammed,
his character, his wives, even his favorite food.
It's a whole world founded on stories of Mohammed.
The Prophet lived his life thanks to camels.
It is the only animal that the Bedouins know.
This is how we live and survive with patience,
patience is a virtue.
We survive without water and without food,
like the prophet before us.
This is how the armies of Islam were able to cross the desert,
and to spread the word of Islam, insha'Allah
But here's the problem: how do we know it was good like that?
How to tell the difference between what really happened past and hearsay and myths?
Do we know if the prophet Mohammed came here?
Yes. When he traveled coming from Mecca,
the prophet stopped under a tree in a place called Al-Safawi.
Was there a tree?
Was Mohammed really a traveling merchant?
The evidence is almost non-existent.
The first biographies which we have
were written almost 200 years ago after the life of Mohammed.
In most religions,
the tradition has been passed down through oral history,
for millennia.
We put that aside. NOW we call it positive history.
Oral tradition is completely denied.
Well, oral tradition means that you remember what you want.
Some of it must be real history,
but most are not clearly not real history.
It's just that they were remodeled, rethought,
they were taken out from their original context
to serve new functions, They were cleaned by...
cleaned, or mixed If you want,
by all kinds of interests that people have in their memories.
Suppose that there is no text of the time of the prophet mentioning his name,
the same is true of Christ, the same is true of Moses,
It doesn't mean anything, because there is always the oral tradition.
Sometimes if you have other sources coming from other points of view,
you can suddenly see what changed, and then
when you can see it, you can see also why it changed,
but because Islam arose
in a relatively corner far from the world,
we do not have these confirmations,
we don't have the key yet who can unlock lore.
I came here to get closer to tradition.
and when you are here, you can feel its weight.
It's in the air.
It is palpable.
It cannot simply be dismissed.
Millions and millions people believe in it,
it's their story.
An entire moral universe was built around
stories told about Mohammed.
It was the Age of Ignorance, before Islam,
when a man had a daughter, he killed her,
he saw it as a disgrace,
He took her and buried her alive,
One of the disciples had a daughter. He went to bury her.
And as he dug the hole,
when the sand spurted into his beard,
she gently took it away from him.
But he buried her alive.
But the prophet came and put an end to these terrible practices.
Listening to all these stories, part of me is very moved,
the other part of me wonders: “Well, how do you know that?
“Where do all these stories come from?
“Are they really authentic?”
Little by little, in the West, for the intellectual elite,
the sense of the sacred has been lost.
A member of a tribe in Africa or the Amazon
has a natural sense of the sacred,
while a graduate student of Oxford probably doesn't have it.
There are topics that must be approached with caution
Muslims believe that from the beginning,
the great Arab conquests were all due to Islam.
But in the 7th century,
you can barely find a new religion called Islam,
mentioned in the historical documents.
And that's why I came here.
We are in Jerusalem.
We've been building walls here for a long time
But they have never yet build a wall
who would keep people safe forever.
In History, the city of God
has always been one of the places the most coveted in the world, the one that had to be conquered
Here, more than anywhere else,
in what was the world of the Roman Empire,
We still live as in the 6th and 7th centuries.
The same tensions,
the same anxieties.
For thousands of years,
Jerusalem was shaped and organized
by the religions of its leaders.
When the Jews ruled,
they built a gigantic temple
who dominated the city.
Later, when the Roman Empire became a Christian,
Jerusalem has been transformed
in world center of Christian pilgrimage.
Look at the street map now, and you see the map of a Christian world.
The Jews had left, erased from the table.
The Romans built a new holy of holies.
The Holy Sepulchre,
a vast cathedral, built on site
traditionally accepted as being that of the crucifixion of Jesus.
This is how God and the Empire functioned.
The Roman Empire believed in God...
.. And God believed in the Roman Empire.
But then,
in the year 636,
God changed his mind.
Arab marauders appear outside the walls.
Sophronius, the bishop of the city,
writes that it is too dangerous to go out.
The Arabs were getting closer.
And there was nothing but inhabitants of Christian Jerusalem
could do about it, except to stay where they were
to keep watch from the walls and wait for the arrival of the Arabs.
And from the depths of the desert they arrived.
And they had become invincible.
In 636 they defeated a Roman army at Yarmouk.
Shortly after, they beat a Persian army at Qadisiya.
Two empires too weak after having fought for so long, to resist the Arabs.
They advanced into the rich provinces defeated empires.
And less than five years after the death of Mohammed,
they set the Promised Land as their objective.
The land where milk and honey flow.
The land that God had promised to the Jews.
Now the Arabs had come claim this inheritance for themselves.
The children of Israel had done of this land a Jewish land.
The Romans had made a Christian holy land.
If the Arabs arrived with a new religion,
then we should be able to find his mark here.
Contemporary Christian sources confirmed that in the late 630s,
The Arabs took Jerusalem through peaceful negotiation.
But what they don't say,
that's what the religion was conquerors.
The truth of the matter is that we don't know
what was the religion really? of the first Arab conquerors.
We have a problem because
this group of people of Arabia is tiny.
And they controlled populations much more important,
which are very well structured on the theological level,
Christians and Jews, and Zoroastrians,
with religious ideas very sophisticated.
Why do these populations Did they not rebel?
against their "Muslim masters", if these Muslim masters then tried to impose
something totally different, hostile to their own beliefs?
What were the Arabs looking for? What were their motivations?
We know they called each other believers, but believers in what?
Some contemporary Christian witnesses tell us that the Arabs believed
in one god, and that they followed a guide or instructor.
But, in general, their understanding of the belief of the Arabs
was not clear at all.
Was it a form of Judaism or a kind of Christianity?
Or did they have news religion of their own?
For the Jews, as well as for Christians,
they are people coming from the desert.
They don't know who these people are.
They don't really know what they believe. They hear things.
But maybe we can get an idea
At the beginning, the new Arab masters seemed closer to the Jews.
They weren't interested through Christian holy places.
Instead, they began to pray on the ruins of the ancient Jewish temple.
All this has only increased the paranoia of Christians.
Behind the invasion of the Arabs,
they began to suspect a Jewish conspiracy.
From the moment the Arabs recaptured Jerusalem,
they immediately came here, about what is now
this wide esplanade, open and artificial.
The holiest place for Jews of the whole world.
So the fact that the conquerors Arabs came here
and built a place of prayer at this important place,
inevitably raised questions
The Jews hope that these Arabs from the desert come as liberators.
They allowed the Jews to return to the Temple Mount and to pray there.
And the Jews began to believe that, perhaps,
there is something messianic in these people,
and perhaps their leader is the Messiah,
which will allow them to rebuild the temple.
Christian theologians, who speak of the Arab conquerors,
find it very difficult to understand
that they are dealing with a new religion.
Who are they ?
One thing is absolutely clear.
Nobody had the slightest idea that the Arabs did what they did
in the name of a new religion freshly hatched and coherent.
Even less than what they were doing was in the name of something
called Islam.
So, did Islam only exist in the early years after Mohammed?
In Jerusalem, 30 years after the conquest, it was 'business as usual'.
There were Christian pilgrims in the streets.
The churches were full.
Ancient religions practiced their ancient rites.
But where was the prophet In all of this ?
30 years after the death of Mohammed, here in Jerusalem,
an Arab warlord named Muawiyah
was acclaimed as leader of the new Arab empire.
But if Muawiyah was Muslim, He barely showed any of it.
The amazing thing is that nowhere,
on any of its inscriptions, on any of its currencies,
and on none of its documents,
there is not the slightest mention of Mohammed.
I tried to track the origins of Islam.
But it's an even bigger mystery that I could never have imagined.
This is the holy book of Islam.
And this is the first source of the Islam that we have.
Find out where the Quran was composed
and you will discover where did Mohammed preach and act,
and so you will be able to get an idea of ​​where Islam may have been born.
In the Quran,
it is said that Mohammed followed the path trodden by Abraham.
Maybe this is the place where to start looking.
I am in Hebron which is a city in the West Bank,
and I am currently in a Jewish colony.
But Hebron is also a Palestinian town,
and so the atmosphere here is probably as tense as elsewhere
between Israelis and Palestinians.
There are Israeli soldiers here with big artillery.
And what they keep here is this,
the burial place of Abraham.
[SONGS AND PRAYERS]
Abraham, through the lineage of his son Isaac,
was the father of the Jews.
When everyone else were still pagans,
Abraham prostrated himself before the one true God.
And, for this, God rewarded him
him and his descendants with the Promised Land,
which is part of today, the state of Israel.
This is Abraham's tomb.
And the reason why the soldiers are here
is that these are not the only people
who consider him their ancestor.
And they're not the only people who believe that God gave them
the promised land.
On the other side of the gate, they are Muslims.
And they tell a different story.
This is the Muslim side. And the reason they recognize Abraham
is that, just like Isaac, he had another son.
Ishmael, the father of the Arabs.
This is Abraham's tomb that we saw earlier on the Jewish side.
But we're looking at it now on the Muslim side.
The importance of Abraham,
and this association which was made between the Arabs and the Ishmaelites,
the children of Ishmael, is in reality much older than Islam itself.
It remains at the heart of Islam to this day.
According to Muslims, Abraham is their prophet
and the religion he founded was not the religion of the Jews,
but Islam.
And in the Quran we read that Ishmael helped Abraham
to build a house of God at a place called Bakkah.
Neither the Koran nor any other contemporary source
doesn't really specify where Bakkah was located,
but the Muslims now have absolutely no doubt
that Bakkah is another name for a place
deep in the Arabian Desert.
Mecca.
The holiest city in Islam.
The birthplace of Mohammed.
It's the biggest mosque of the world.
At its center,
the Kaaba, the House of God.
First built by Abraham and his son Ishmael,
on the established foundations by the first man, Adam.
This place is older and holier
than anywhere else in the world.
It's in the heights of the city
that Mohammed received the first of his revelations from God.
These revelations will form the holy book of Islam,
the Koran,
the very word of God.
Mecca...
is the place where Muslims believe it all started.
The crossroads of faith
and history.
It's probably here then, do you think,
that we could find evidence solid information regarding the beginnings of Islam.
But there is a problem.
Apart from a single ambiguous mention in the Quran itself,
there is no trace of Mecca,
not a single mention
in none of the texts that we can date, until 100 years after the death of Mohammed.
How can we know that Did Mohammed come from Mecca?
We can not.
But on the other hand, if it doesn't come from there,
you would have to put on the table a plausible alternative
explaining where it could have really come from and why then want to bring it from Mecca.
Why do you want to bring it from there?
Well, you know, that’s what historians do.
If things don't make sense, you try something else that might have it.
Here we are.
So is that it?
Yes, we are there.
In the Quran it is said for the faithful to pray
in the direction of a sacred shrine.
But what he never says is that this sanctuary was located in Mecca.
And, for some archaeologists,
some old mosques suggest something different.
We are talking about one of the oldest mosques
that we have.
And you date it 100 years after Mohammed?
Somewhere around 100 years old.
Because here, as and when we are moving forward, you can see.
That's all ?
Yes that's it.
Is this THE mosque?
This is THE mosque.
-And what you can- - It's, it's-
- And what you can see here, - [Laughs]
we have an axis which does not face Mecca, which does not face south,
in fact it faces east,
towards the rising sun.
This is an example from the time
before the direction has been defined,
towards Mecca.
So the implication is that, at this early stage of Islam,
the direction of prayer had not not yet been absolutely fixed?
The direction of prayer did not have been still well established, yes.
So it's a bit like the concrete which has not yet set.
You can still play with it, you can still tinker with it,
- you can experiment with it. - Quite.
Yes.
Maybe it's not a decisive clue.
But it is quite suggestive that,
even if there is no Muslim source,
there are reports coming of Christian writers of the time
that the Arab conquerors bowed while praying
not towards Mecca,
but in one direction completely different,
somewhere further north.
In the Quran...
it is actually never said that Mohammed lived in Mecca.
No more than Mecca was the place where the first revelations took place.
Does the text of the Quran point Mecca as the place
revelations of from God to Mohammed?
No, this is not the case.
I mean it's done mention of a sanctuary,
there is a sanctuary, for sure.
But where is this sanctuary, this, of course we can't say that.
It's devilishly difficult to,
somehow, extract text what the context could have been.
In the Muslim tradition, the people of Mecca are pagans,
idol worshippers.
But in fact...
People the Quran Describes
have knowledge deep and sophisticated
of the biblical tradition.
The Quran tells the biblical story and refers to biblical stories,
not only biblical, but also post-biblical developments.
All this is clearly known to the listeners of the sermon.
This suggests that what we have is a kind of answer, on part of,
let's say, Mohammed in the debates which were taking place
in communities Christians and Jews.
They discussed the problems and theological questions
which come from the Hebrew Bible and come out of the New Testament.
And the Quran seems to be an effort to participate in the discussion
and therefore there is a strong link
with religious speeches from late antiquity
who had in progress throughout the Middle East.
So it's obviously not of a pagan world that we are talking about.
People in the Quran worship a single god.
But he then accuses them of praying for beings other than God.
And there is something else.
The people to whom the prophet addresses in the Koran are peasants,
farmers, but there was no no agriculture in Mecca.
Mecca has no agrarian base.
Mecca seems to have been a fairly arid valley.
If Mecca is this place sterile, infertile,
how is it that, in the Quran, the adversaries of the prophet
are described as herding livestock and growing olives and vines?
Hmm, good question.
This is one of the reasons why some researchers believe
that the text of the Quran is rather to connect, say, to Syria.
Because that's where the vines grow and olives, much further north.
Geographic Syria, you don't don't find olive trees in Mecca.
So if Mecca was not the starting point of Islam,
Where was it ?
If you follow the clues given by the Quran itself...
then you have to look for a territory inhabited by Arabs cultivating olive trees,
who have deep knowledge of the biblical tradition,
but whose monotheism
may seem, to some, a bit misguided.
This is the city of Avdat,
in the Negev desert.
At the beginning of the 7th century,
it was an Arab city at the gates same of the Roman Empire.
A Christian city, but with clues to a recent pagan past.
There is no doubt that it is of a place of Christian worship.
There are two crosses on the ceiling.
But there is also something very interesting in the area,
it is a bull with horns.
And the bull is an image which, most likely,
is drawn from pagan Arab traditions much older natives,
This does not mean that the Christians who did this
were themselves pagans, but that means, I think,
that they give to their monotheism,
to their belief in a single god, a little pagan color.
And that, essentially, is the crime including Mohammed, in the Koran,
seems to accuse his adversaries.
But Avdat had more than the right religious color.
She also had agriculture and olives.
In the time of Mohammed, all this would have been green.
It would have been agricultural fields as far as the eye can see.
Archeology leaves no doubt
that there was a system sophisticated irrigation here
who really made the desert bloom.
And so, although this does not mean that this Avdat
or the exact location where the Quran was composed,
this means, I think, that the region as a whole,
seems to correspond to broader context of the Quran
much better than the territories located much further south,
in the arid region of Mecca.
When you read the Quran again and again,
which is really striking, compared, say, to the Bible,
which is full of allusions to recognizable landscapes,
that we know.
In the Quran, you have to make an effort to find an allusion to a
any landscape or natural setting that we could really pin down.
In fact, throughout the Quran,
there is really only one exception.
Not far from Avdat,
a strange clue from where the Koran could actually
come.
We are on the south shore of the Dead Sea.
Between what is now, Israel and Jordan.
Lot was Abraham's nephew,
and he went to settle down in a city called Sodom.
And the people of Sodom were notoriously “bon vivants”.
Unsurprisingly, this provoked the wrath of God.
He destroyed his city and it is said that this would be the remains of Sodom,
where the wrath of God was poured on her.
And the Quran:
"And Lot was, indeed, of the number of Messengers,
"When We saved him, him and his entire family,
"except an old woman who had to disappear with the others,
“And We destroyed the others.
"And you certainly pass with them in the morning and at night."
But if the people to whom the prophet addresses
pass by this place day and night,
so what is he doing here?
1,000 kilometers from Mecca.
For someone who is looking for clues...
You are almost in the same situation as a gold prospector.
And I think this passage is just a little glitter.
I mean, there's a possibility, of course,
who is this excerpt or originating from these surroundings.
Maybe the rest came from elsewhere.
But this then raises the question
where do all the different ones come from parts that constitute the Quran.
Should they be necessarily attributed
to a living person at a specific time?
Again, when you start asking this question,
it is very difficult to know how far it can lead.
These kinds of stories come from the West.
that the reason would be the ultimate decision-maker and judge of truth.
But what I'm saying is that these stories aren't really going to give you
the reason that satisfies logic.
Where do you think the place is most likely of its origin?
Ah, good.
This I do not know.
[Laughs]
This I do not know.
I don't think I should speculate on that.
OK. Alright. [Laughs]
OK.
My biggest fear is that I am completely wrong.
I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night
thinking I have it all wrong.
Once the world is shrunk
to a mechanical world,
then all other levels of reality
lose their status and become unreal.
And they're relegated to the field of what we call superstition.
And what we don't see...
is considered not to exist.
Trying to find the origins of Islam was like chasing a mirage.
The Arabs conquered half the world,
but they don't talk about Mohammed.
There is no mention of Mecca.
So what are they doing in detective novels?
They follow the money.
Are they-
what is the first piece of currency which actually mentions
the name of the prophet Mohammed on coins?
Is one of these pieces mention Mohammed by name?
Um, this is Muawiyah.
Yes, but does the name of the Prophet Mohammed is mentioned?
No no.
Each piece tells a story.
Each registration conveys an idea of ​​power.
But sometimes, what is not on the part
maybe just as important than what is.
It would be nice to see the first piece that mentions Mohammed.
The oldest coin with the name of Mohammed, they don't have it, but...
It's just that- it's strange that 60 years after the death of Mohammed,
there is no mention of Mohammed.
For almost 60 years,
the masters of the Arab empire did not not put Mohammed on their pieces.
And then they did it.
Maybe 60 was what they needed
to finalize what was really the story.
Maybe the question is not why was Mohammed not
on the parts at first, but how he ended up there.
What if I had asked the wrong question?
And if it wasn't Islam that had gave birth to the Arab empire?
But if it was rather the Arab empire who gave birth to Islam?
The Empire was rich beyond all imagination.
Around 685, it extended from northern Persia to Egypt
and in North Africa.
But who had the right to direct it?
An essential question on which the Arabs could not agree.
And with so much at stake, they began to wage war against each other.
We are in 680.
50 years after the death of Mohammed.
A deadly spiral rebellion and civil war
threatens the Arab empire which risks imploding.
And from the depths of the Arabian desert,
a new claimant to the throne emerges.
Her name ?
Abdullah Ibn Al-Zubair.
And Ibn Al-Zubair will change the rules of the game.
What I found here is the piece that I was looking for
in the Coin Museum.
And she is struck, literally, at the corner of the genius of Ibn Al-Zubair.
It was minted in 685, 686,
It's more than half a century after the death of Mohammed.
And it has a slogan new and fateful,
"In the name of God, Mohammed is the prophet of God."
And here, finally, emerging from the black hole,
we finally find the mention of a prophet called Mohammed.
And this is the first time that we can find it among all the inscriptions,
all surviving documents from this period.
Ibn Al-Zubair had understood well what Constantine,
the first Christian Roman emperor, had understood long before him,
that it was not good to be at the head of a land empire,
and pretend to have the graces of the Lord,
if he could not demonstrate with absolute certainty, the foundation
on which he made this assertion.
And Constantine, in his attempt obtain this confirmation,
had turned to the Christian church.
But Ibn Al-Zubair turns towards the figure of Mohammed.
Subsequently, Ibn Al-Zubair loses the civil war,
he is defeated by a rival warlord
who also claims the throne of the Arab empire.
But the discovery that the name of Mohammed
can be used to ground temporal power, did not fall on deaf ears.
The civil war had been very close.
And the victorious warlord, Abd al-Malik,
was very concerned about this that the posterity of Mohammed
can never fall into the hands of a dangerous rival.
The Romans knew everything about religion and power.
When they became Christians,
they had redesigned the map of Jerusalem.
And so, Abd al-Malik embarked on the project of shaping the holy city he needed.
God, it's beautiful.
The Dome of the Rock.
It is the oldest construction Islamic.
In its conception it was Roman,
and Abd al-Malik was doing something else typically Roman.
Link your authority to the power of God.
On the walls there is a statement unequivocal.
"Religion, in the eyes of God, is Islam."
There are mentions of Mohammed, Quran quotes.
Finally, something we we can undoubtedly recognize
like a new religion.
We can clearly see here that something again is being born.
There is this dimension of the past, the Roman style pillars and mosaics.
And yet, it is clearly not Roman, it is clearly not Christian,
this is the start of something very, very powerful.
A warning sign of a spectacular future.
It was built on the same site of the ancient Jewish temple.
Here below, the first stone foundation of the world.
The place where the earth and the heavens meet.
It is certainly one the most extraordinary places
of the whole planet.
He is deeply, deeply holy,
not one, but two great religions.
This is the place where the Jews believe that God inhabits the Earth,
the Holy of Holies, the Shekinah.
And for Muslims, it is the cave where Mohammed prayed
after being brought here from Mecca before ascending to heaven
to be confirmed as being the last of the prophets.
So in religious terms it is like a kind of nuclear reactor,
which forcefully projects all its isotopes, all its power.
It is certainly a very big statement,
that "we, Muslims, you have replaced you Jews.
And we replaced you, you Christians"
by filling it with inscriptions
directed against the Christian Trinitarian faith.
And so, we see Muslims affirm: we are here, we are here to stay,
and we are the winners.
Abd al-Malik now reigns over his empire like a lieutenant of God,
just like the Christian emperors Romans had done it.
And like the Roman emperors, he built a house of God in Jerusalem.
But Abd al-Malik, all Lord of Jerusalem that he is, is also an Arab.
Maybe for the Arabs, Jerusalem, with all its power
ancient and unparalleled,
owed too much to the Jews and to Christians to stay
the only holy city of the new Arab empire.
A poet at court by Abd al-Malik describes it
like the Lord of two houses, dedicated to God.
One in Jerusalem,
and the other, well, he doesn't say where she is.
And for the next 100 years the death of Mohammed,
no one says where she is.
All sources call it “a place in the desert.”
It is "a sanctuary in the desert", without giving it a name.
It is therefore necessary that at one time or another, this sanctuary was placed in Mecca,
in the middle of the desert.
But why ?
The truth of the matter is,
we don't know what it really was religion of the first Arab cultures.
It's an Arab story.
The Arabs come from the desert.
God speaks to the Arabs.
They don't want Jews or Christians
have any influence on Mohammed.
The Prophet Mohammed was an Arab, like us.
We are his offspring. We are his descendants.
The Quran is in Arabic,
the Quran is full of characters from the Bible.
But if the book came out of the desert,
how these characters did they get there?
We have nothing.
We only have this book, Out of nowhere.
We don't have the key who can unlock lore.
But maybe that's the point.
We are not supposed to unlock lore.
God's message comes to a prophet, the prophet lives in a desert.
There is no room for anyone else.
It's remote.
It's far away, it's no contaminated, it is pure.
This is a place where we can exclude that Mohammed
got his ideas from from sources other than God.
It is interesting to note that the vision rationalist of history is very weak
when it comes to being able to provide causes for certain effects.
"Not being able to know something"
"is not proof that it doesn't exist."
You start by looking in the written, and you find only emptiness.
And you find yourself in the desert and all you see is emptiness.
But maybe emptiness is the answer.
Maybe Mecca gave Islam what she needed most,
a white sheet...
where Muslims could put their prophet,
beyond the scope of the story.
Professor, do you think that what I do
it is to be the accomplice of this brutal reality of Western imperialism,
Western hegemony?
No, not necessarily.
As long as you're a man aware of what you are doing.
If you come as Western researcher or historian
and that in all honesty you present what is your worldview,
you say "When I look at the world Islamic from this paradigm,"
"this is what I see",
and you highlight why this is different from how Muslims see themselves,
that, I think, is a very honest effort,
and it's a good effort.
But if you try to act like a doctor with a child,
"Take this medicine, it's good for you."
"You know what, you don't eat no good things.”
“That’s how you should do it.”
This is where the problem begins.
And the Muslim world I'm not going to accept this.
The time when the British brought scholars of England
to teach the Indians how to be Hindu, or Muslims, it's over.
It's finish.
That's right, before I start, I had preconceived ideas.
I was raised in the Christian religion,
but I was also raised in an environment
which calls everything into question.
The study of ancient history is a stripping process,
which undermines the little truth we believe we find in our stories.
This is supposed to be Mount Sinai, where Moses saw the burning bush,
where God gave him the ten Commandments,
but there is no proof history of all this.
A Christian monastery, Roman fortifications,
the old good partnership, God and the Empire,
between them they made this place Sinai.
In my heart I want to believe it, but my head won't let me do it.
We believe there is a tradition alive kept by the people here,
that this is where God revealed himself in an extraordinary way.
What would it be like if it turned out that it wasn't here
that Moses would have received the ten Commandments ?
The spiritual encounter with God is more important.
The reality is there,
even if your eyes are not open to see things as they are.
God is always present, but you are not sensitive to its presence.
Ultimately, the City of God matters more than the City of Men.
Yes.
But as a historian,
I must assume that the City of God was also built by man.
I wanted to describe the past human in human terms,
to make a map which corresponds to the facts.
But I've been to places where the map revealed a celestial plane,
sacred lands,
sacred places,
a world where you don't have to believe in God
to feel the power of God.
This is the Promised Land.
Some call it Israel, some call it Palestine,
a country where Muslims, Christians and the Jews are still fighting each other
because of the story of a promise God made to Abraham thousands of years ago.
Was there really a promise?
It is not for the historian to say.
But the world that believers do in the name of God,
That’s what the story is about.
Even today, more people live and die in hope of paradise
that they never will for historical facts.
Stories that never happened can be infinitely more powerful
than the stories that happened.
I wanted to write history from the beginnings of Islam.
If you are a Muslim, then there is no problem,
everything is explained by God. But I'm not a Muslim,
and I don't think that civilizations appear like lightning
could fall in the middle of a big blue sky.
What I think now is that Islam was born
from a whole series of circumstances,
from religions and empires,
and convulsions of the world who saw his birth.
And of course, It's always like that,
the black hole that envelops the beginnings of Islam
do not give up its secrets easily.
But maybe we We're trying to find something.
The search for the Mohammed of History,
of the origins of the Koran,
of the location of the first sanctuary,
about how Islam evolved from the Arab Empire,
here are the pieces of a brand new story.
Subtitles by Olaf
This research has indeed progressed a lot compared to what Tom Holland shows in his documentary
We can delve deeper into the subject by reading The Great Secret of Islam
... summary of the latest research on the origins of Islam, to be consulted freely from the site
http://legrandsecretdelislam.com