This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Writing the history of Islam is, as John Tolan observes, a challenge not just because one has to address current sensitivities that date all the way back to the 7th century, such as the nature of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims, but because it is never entirely clear where the boundaries of the subject lie.
Aspects of Muslim life that tend to be regarded as standard prove to have had major exceptions, such as the portrayal of human figures or the drinking of wine. Then there is the question, “Who is a Muslim?” The Alawites, from whom the Assad dynasty sprang, have been dismissed by other Muslims as pagans; and the Druze, who trace their origins back to the “Mad Caliph” al-Hakim in the early 11th century, are equally secretive about their beliefs and practices.
Then there is the existence of large non-Muslim religious minorities in most Islamic lands, going back to the formulation in the 7th century of basic principles whereby God-fearing Jews and Christians were guaranteed the right to practise their own religion, subject to certain disabilities that were not always strictly applied.
Originally, in lands under Islamic rule where the early Muslims were a minority, it was necessary to permit others to practise their faith; taxes on the “Peoples of the Book” sustained the armies of the conquerors. Nor is it a surprise that members of the Islamic warrior caste often took non-Muslim wives — there was a shortage of Muslim-born women in lands such as Spain that were undergoing conquest. Over the centuries, Islam added non-Abrahamic religions to its system of protection, notably the Zoroastrians in Persia and even Hindus in India.
Out of this, though, grows uncertainty about what should be included in a short history of Islam. Should it be about doctrine, delving into the subtleties of Mu’tazilite rationalism, or the question of whether the 12th century Almohads were ingenious Aristotelians or, alternatively, theological minimalists largely ignorant of both religion and philosophy? Where does one place the idiosyncratic, syncretistic Barghawata of early medieval Morocco?
Alternatively, should one instead concentrate on the conquests of the early Muslims, the succession of rival dynasties claiming the office of Caliph and the rise of the Ottomans and other imperial powers in eastern Europe, Persia and beyond? Where is one to place the role of the Islamic world (here including Christian and Jewish intermediaries) in the dissemination of philosophical and medical texts originally written in Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world?
A further area of uncertainty is the amount of emphasis that needs to be placed on the Arabs. In fact, the very word “Arabs” — an ancient term that you can find in the Hebrew Bible — has to be treated with care. If it means speakers of Arabic, that of course includes many non-Muslims. If it just means the inhabitants of all or part of the Arabian peninsula, that necessarily excludes all those parts of the world, from Morocco to Iraq, where people still regard themselves as ethnically Arab, even though some regional vernaculars are distinctive enough to qualify as separate languages.
A notable feature of the conversion of Berbers, Turks and other non-Arab peoples was the discrimination which they often suffered as non-Arabs, leading their kinglets in Spain and the Turkish sultans to claim ties of blood to the family of Muhammad. But Arabisation had its limits; the Turks and the Persians managed to preserve the use of their own language not just in everyday use but as literary languages.
Arabisation did not necessarily mean Islamisation. Tolan is not the first to include Moses Maimonides amongst the influential sages of the Islamic world, even though he was one of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages. But he did owe something to Islam, having studied the Koran, and was influenced by the intellectual debates revolving around Aristotle that were going on in 12th century Islamic Spain. He wrote his most important work Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, and he became Saladin’s physician in Cairo.
As Tolan observes, the early Islamic world only gradually turned predominantly Muslim. Around the year 1000, for instance, Coptic Christians remained the largest religious group in Egypt, then under the control of the Shiite Fatimid caliphs. In the parts of Spain that lay under Muslim rule, Christians probably became a minority only in the 10th century. In Persia, Zoroastrianism lingered not just as a separate religion but as the source of customs that are still observed, notably the Persian New Year.
In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Berbers of the Atlas and further south, who turned into the warrior sects of the Almoravids and Almohads, probably knew little of the finer detail of Islamic practice before charismatic leaders brought them knowledge from further east. The extension of Islam eastwards carried on as Muslim merchants established themselves in China, whilst in the early 15th century, the Hindu rajah of Malacca adopted Islam and became a sultan.
Rolling much of this into a short book is an achievement by any standards, but inevitably there are areas where Tolan should have provided further context to make the story more comprehensible. At the very beginning of his story there is the puzzle about religious beliefs in Arabia on the eve of the emergence of Islam.
Jewish, Christian and Arab monotheists lived side-by-side. One wants to know more about how their beliefs fed into early Islam. The influence of Judaism is clear in the early practice of praying towards Jerusalem, only later Mecca. It is also visible in food taboos, admittedly less strict than those of Judaism.
Both Judaism and Christianity have their own versions of the stories about Biblical figures that are mirrored, often with significant variants, in the Koran. The cocktail of religions in the 7th century Middle East was the subject of controversial research by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, arguing for strong Jewish, Christian and also Samaritan influences on Muhammad and his circle; that should have been addressed.
Then there is the question posed by the Egyptian academic Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who was forced into exile after attempting to analyse the Koran as a literary text. Many years ago I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar. I asked him whether what he was trying to do was similar to the research that has been conducted since the mid-19th century on the text of the Bible (and particularly the Pentateuch).
Scholars have been attempting to uncover different layers of authorship and to work out how the early Israelites conceived of God, evidently in ways very different from Maimonides or Martin Buber. But my dinner companion was nonplussed. It is impossible to think of this approach in the Islamic world. Reverence for the Koran as the unmediated word of God is arguably even more powerful than reverence for the Torah amongst Jews.
Tolan’s book jumps too quickly over the 17th and 18th centuries, memorable in Europe because of the persistent menace of the Barbary Corsairs and the presence of an Ottoman threat in the borderlands of eastern Europe. He is much more interesting when he looks at the 20th century, giving a measured account of tensions before and after the creation of the State of Israel, and he is eloquent about the failure of the Arab Spring to bring about democratic change in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.
Wisely he does not engage with the latest developments, having to rush through topics such as the growing presence of Islam in the UK and US, where he brings out clearly the eccentricities of Malcolm X and of the “Nation of Islam” in relation to mainstream Islam. Always hanging over this is the question mark about the relationship between Islamism and Islam.
The failure of primarily nationalist movements led by Nasser, Saddam Hussein and others propelled political activists in a different direction, towards solutions based in rigid and extreme religious positions.
Maybe, then, Tolan has bitten off more than he, or anyone, can chew. A short book on the history of Islam needs to focus on religion or politics or social and economic developments, rather than attempting to embrace all these topics. Tolan’s book offers something of each, which is both a virtue and a failing. Nonetheless, he provides a handy, thoughtful and well-written introduction to a myriad of aspects of the history of the Islamic world across the span of nineteen centuries.
