144 Quotes by Tom Holland

Winners are the favourites of heaven.

The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether.

The ‘ulama’, by tightly controlling what went into the history books, were able to propagate an understanding of their own dazzlingly rich and complex civilization that attributed almost every single thing of value within it to the Prophet, and the Prophet alone. There was no question of acknowledging the momentous roles played in the forging of Islam by countless others – be they autocrats such as Abd Al-Malik or scholars such as themselves.

Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.

Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.

Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.

JULIA: Oldest daughter of Julia and Agrippa. Owner of the smallest dwarf in Rome. Exiled in AD 8.

The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61.