The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam

A friend shared a link to Tom Holland's recent article in the Guardian, about the Fall of Rome and the rise of Islam.

I thought it very good: Holland is a fine writer. In true Blogger fashion I have some half-digested thoughts to share.

I always understood that among Sci-Fi fans, "the Mule" in the Foundation Trilogy has long been understood as an unflattering portrait of L. Ron Hubbard, whose inauguration of a science fiction religion had roughly the same effect on North American SF fans that Muhammad's revelation had on the post-classical world.

It seems astounding that Holland manages to all but ignore the fact that the Roman Empire was mostly replaced by Christian societies, not Islamic. Those Greek Egyptians who received that invoice for sheep that he mentions, were not exactly members of some pagan cult: Egypt had been Christian for 300 years by that time.

Then he also neglects to mention what may be the most interesting thing about Asimov and Herbert, which is that their books have scant or no Christian content. People had been writing novels about the Fall of Rome for hundreds of years -- you could fill a whole library with such books, though they are all unread today. I used to own one that I picked out of a dollar bin in Texas: a big fat elegant blue-backed thing from the 1890s with gold-edged pages and a pompous kind of title like "Sunlight and Shadow" or some such, execrably written by a dull and no-doubt fat 19th century Evangelical minister, and all about the spiritual awakening of some Roman aristocrat's beautiful daughter with milk-white skin and sexy lips, as she becomes attracted to the persecuted sect in the catacombs, falls under the sway of its compelling bearded bishop, and learns to recognize her True Lord in Christ. "Quo Vadis" is another such book, far more famous. Now why would Tom Holland make no mention of this?

He doesn't say much about Star Wars either, perhaps because its narrative of political rebellion, which could certainly be classical or proto-Christian, doesn't fit the pattern. How true, that what people don't say can reveal as much as what they do. "In other regions ... there are even more haunting silences." Indeed.

Holland's connection of late Roman catastrophe to Tolkien's Middle Earth history, by way of Arthurian romance, is ingenious, perhaps not ironclad but insightful. Tolkien's book does achieve much of its effect by its background reference to sprawling, ancient ruined places, to regions once beautiful and cultivated but now waste, grown up with tangled forest and now the haunt of murderous creatures. Schooled on such works, we want our ruins vast and gloomy. The real ruins scattered about the Holy Land almost always disappoint, in part because they are so small and beaten down, and washed in sun.

What myths will we tell ourselves, who live in a world where nothing can be conceded as true unless it is subject to measurement?