SHADOWY EDIFICE:

At the heart of the mystery is the Quran. Muslims believe it to have been transmitted orally by Muhammad before being written down and collected under the Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656. The Quran, as well as celebrating the divine in nature with veiled allusions to historical places and events, makes reference to stories contained in the Old and New Testaments and to theological ideas in Gnostic and other heretical texts. No less important, the Quran is the foremost source for Muhammad's life.

"Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet," says Mr. Holland, "the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground." For the historian, however, this is more of a problem than a solution. The text is short on details of places and persons: There is only one reference to Mecca, four to Muhammad himself. Mr. Holland explains that, "unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers--from Cyrus to Augustus--the Quran betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. . . . The focus of the Quran is fixed implacably, not on the personal but on the divine."

Mr. Holland finds that much of the Quranic imagery associated with Muhammad's Qurayshite opponents--generally referred to as idolators--does not tally with the Quran's supposedly Arabian provenance. For example, the idolators are condemned for slitting the ears of their livestock or exempting certain cattle from having to carry a load. Such details are puzzling, as Mr. Holland shows: "Mecca, a place notoriously dry and barren, is not, most agronomists would agree, an obvious spot for cattle ranching--just as the volcanic dust that constitutes its soil is signally unsuited to making 'grain grow, and vines, fresh vegetation . . . fruit and fodder,' " as mentioned in the Quran.

When elucidating the occasions when Muhammad is supposed to have received his divine messages, later Muslim chroniclers, including Muhammad's earliest biographers, filled gaps in the Quranic narrative, supplying the missing details from the vast corpus of hadiths. These reports were orally transmitted over many generations before being written down in various collections, several of which acquired canonical status.

Some early Muslim authorities expressed doubts about the historical value of the hadiths, as do scholars raised in the rigorous traditions of modern textual criticism. The problem, however, is that the edifice of hadiths--including those from which the narrative of the prophet's life was constructed some two centuries after his death--now constitute the sunna, the prophet's exemplary custom, which forms the foundations of Islamic law and practice. To abandon the hadiths, the liberal scholar Fazlur Rahman argued in 1965, would be to open up a "yawning chasm of fourteen centuries" between the time of the prophet and today's believers.

As a historian of late antiquity Mr. Holland can afford to ignore such inhibitions. He fills the "yawning chasm" of our knowledge with evidence culled from a much wider variety of sources--Zoroastrian and Persian, Jewish and Roman, Christian and Gnostic--than are usually considered by specialists. Without discarding the role of supernatural agencies altogether, he contextualizes them within the broader framework of the beliefs about religion, politics, power and authority that characterized the world of late antiquity.

Mr. Holland admits that his answers are "unashamedly provisional," but he traces a broad arc that connects the rise of Islam with the religious themes that accompanied the decline of the imperial systems of Rome, Byzantium and Persia. His conclusions may be tentative, but they are convincing. His book is elegantly written and refreshingly free from specialist jargon. Marshaling its resources with dexterity, it is a veritable tour de force.

In a view that Mr. Holland takes forward from Wansbrough and his disciples, Islam was born not in the deserts of Arabia but in the borders of Syria-Palestine, a region that had long been devastated by plagues and wars--the usual precursors of apocalyptic scenarios and millennial hopes. 

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