Historian Tom Holland: Islam, Christianity & the West

26:31Tom Holland:But just as important, or possibly even more important, is the role of keeping the gods on side. And in that, women have a very, very important role. They provide, they weave the robes that every year is given to one of the two statues on the Acropolis. So every fourth year, there's an enormous one that goes to the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, and every year a slightly smaller one to the kind of the ancient wooden statue of the goddess. They feed the holy snakes on the Acropolis with cakes. They practice cults at the great festival of Dionysus. They welcome Dionysus in. And women go to a temple in the marshes to Dionysus.

27:23Tom Holland:And there one of them has sex with a king. And nobody really knows what this involves. But I mean, it's clearly something's going on there. And the thing I love is that every young girl in Athens, when she becomes 10, goes to this temple of Artemis, who, like Athena, is a kind of terrifying goddess, virgin goddess, mistress of the beasts, she's called. And girls go out there, and we're told in the classical sources that there they turn into bears. And scholars debate, what does this mean? I mean, is it a puberty ritual? Do they put on the robes of bears, the skins of bears? Nobody pauses to think, well, maybe they did turn into bears.

28:02Tom Holland:But what if they did turn into bears? What if they did? They are then roaming with Artemis out in the wilds. They have experienced things that men have not experienced. And every man who marries a woman in Athens is marrying someone who's run with Artemis, who's run with the animals. And I think people believe that. And it gives a shiver of the supernatural and the weird to the functioning of Athens in its golden age that we find very difficult to get a handle on. Because, of course, the instincts of historians are incredibly materialist. And even if they do believe in the supernatural, they don't believe in the Greek gods.

28:38Tom Holland:But you've got to try and believe in them. And when you do, you see that it's part of the rhythm and the fabric of the functioning of the entire city. And this is why, in the long run, the philosophers are so threatening to that. Because if you're turning around and saying, that's all rubbish, God is kind of perfection in some distant moral order or something, what role is there then for girls going off and turning into bears and running with Artemis? with Artemis.

29:10Francis Foster:Well, look, I'm no historian, but I'm fairly comfortable with the idea of women turning into bears every now and again. That is a familiar experience. But I was going to come back to Christianity because one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is, from my personal experience, I was surrounded by a lot of Orthodox Christians when I was growing up, my family Orthodox Christians. And one of the things I found quite incongruous was that there was a doctrine of what you're supposed to do. And then I'd observe people who... Orthodoxy. There was an orthodoxy that nobody actually did any of those things.

29:48Francis Foster:They just talked about them. And one of the interesting things to me about Christianity is I imagine, you know, my Anglican friends, let's say, who are kind of very peaceful and docile, almost you might say, and very kind and generous, etc. That is not the way that Christianity has been practiced through the centuries in some parts of the world. So, the message of Jesus turning the other cheek and all these other things, that is not also the way that Christianity has been practiced throughout the ages either. There's been quite militant periods. There's been periods of internal persecution, of all sorts of recrimination between different branches, etc.

30:29Francis Foster:How does all of that happen?

30:36Christianity, I think, is best thought of as a kind of great pulsing matrix of paradoxes.

30:51Tom Holland:Paradox structures everything about it. I mean, you know, we've been talking about one. The guy on the cross who proves to be greater than the person who's crucified him. The man who is also a god. And I guess that this is the kind of the Christian understanding of the divine, that in a sense paradox structures the inability of the human mind to contemplate the potency of the divine. And that being so, there are many, many different ways of structuring and understanding what it is to be a Christian. And a lot of these are generated by the fact that, you know, and it's a crucial development that might not have happened, that in the second century, there's a guy called Marcion who makes, points out that the God of the New Testament seems quite different to the God of the Old Testament.

31:51Francis Foster:The God of the Old Testament.

31:53Tom Holland:He's busy. King David holds a census and God goes ballistic and kind of wipes all the children of Israel out with a plague. There's a lot of smiting. And now suddenly Jesus is saying, oh, you know, turn the other cheek and put up your sword. And what's going on here? And so Marcion's theory was that the God of the Old Testament was a different, essentially a kind of subordinate angel who had usurped the true God's role and that Jesus had therefore been sent by the true God to kind of put humanity back on the straight and narrow. And he proposed that there should be a very finite number of scriptures.

32:38Tom Holland:So the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Apostles, some of the letters of Paul, basically. And this is a key moment because I think you can already by this point talk about Orthodox Christians, Christians who embody the kind of the mainstream or at least the kind of the central gravity in the church. They do not follow that. But because of this challenge, they have to decide what is the canon going to be? What are our scriptures going to be? and they choose the four Gospels because these are the ones that are the most closest to the time. They're the ones that are generally accepted as being the most authentic record.

33:17Tom Holland:And, you know, the various letters of Paul and the book of Revelation and so on. And they also decide to keep what they come to term the Old Testament. And the sense that God had prefigured the coming of Christ in the Hebrew Scriptures. And by doing that, it sets up opportunities for Christians to emphasize things that perhaps aren't being emphasized in the passion narratives. Let's put it like that.

33:50Francis Foster:Well, what I'm getting at, Tom, is, let me put it more bluntly, you know, you're very eloquent and a historian. I'm just, what I'm saying is, in my understanding... Why have Christians behaved in a monstrous way throughout history? For example, I guess what I'm saying is my experience of Christians today is that if somebody stood up and went, you know what, these people are heretics and they must be eradicated, most Christians would be like, well, that's a bit much. Do you know what I mean?

34:17Tom Holland:Well, that's been a long process of weathering and transformation. And the thing is that Christianity isn't a, you know, it's a constantly, I mean, it's best thought of, I think, as a kind of civilization. You know, things evolve and change, and different emphases are happening all the time.

34:32Francis Foster:This is why I'm asking, because when you talk to Christians today, they will say, compare it to Islam, right? If you say, well, Islam is not as drastic today as it was when it was first created, probably true. And process of weathering is perfect explanation to my layman understanding. You'll probably rip into this, right? But with Christianity, there was the message of compassion and empathy and turning the other cheek and all of that from the beginning. So what is it that's being weathered over the 2000 year period?

35:00Tom Holland:Okay, so go back to the issue of paradox. Paul, in his letters, writing to the Galatians, so this is really, I mean, might even be among the earliest of letters, so right at the start of the Christian tradition. He writes to them and he says that in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no man or woman, there is no slave or free. So he's dissolving the traditional boundaries that are separated, you know, the two sexes, the different peoples of the world, and the different social orders.

35:30Francis Foster:It's very progressive.

35:31Tom Holland:Well, he's saying in Christ Jesus. I mean, he's not... The world is fallen. These differences and what stems from these differences are part of the lot of the children of Adam and Eve. We're all part of this fallen world. I mean, that's the gist. But that in Christ, they will be dissolved. This is the heaven that is promised. um now of course there is it's like an acorn from which a great oak will flourish and i would say that the the um the assumptions that govern a liberal society derive from that the idea that men and women have an inherent equality that um differences of between peoples are you know are iniquitous to emphasize.

36:25Tom Holland:We'll come to slavery perhaps in due course, but the idea that there should be... You can see that there is no slave or free. It feeds in the long run into abolitionism, it feeds into the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution. These are very, very long-term consequences. Another metaphor would be, that is a grumbling of the earth, a grinding of the tectonic plates, and in due course, Tokyo gets drowned by a tsunami. It's that kind of, that's what it is. But right from the beginning, there is a problem with one of those in particular, which is Paul's assertion that there is no Jew or Greek.

37:07Tom Holland:He writes, what he means is Judean or Greek. He is a Judean. He's from Judea. He is therefore a provincial like any other, you know, there are all kinds of people, Judeans, Egyptians, whatever, and he's comparing them to the Greeks. And he's saying that the differences between Judeans and Greeks will dissolve in Christ, i.e. there will be a kind of universal brotherhood, sisterhood, whatever. However, famously, not all Judeans are keen on having their sense of distinctiveness dissolved into a kind of universal mush. And so they do not, in the main, follow Paul's exhortation to accept Christ as Lord.

37:52Tom Holland:And that then means that there is a fracture point right from the beginning between people who will come to be defined as Christians and Jews. And that is obviously an incredibly dark shadow that has hung over the entire course of Christianity. But you can see how what seems to us a progressive message has kind of led to what we could also see as very dark consequences. And that is just one verse from one book of the New Testament, which in turn is part of, you know, includes the Old Testament. There is a lot of material there that can provide sanction for a broad, broad array of responses and that can also set in train all kinds of trends that, you know, would have seemed unimaginable in the first century AD.

38:46Tom, is that why so everyone can drink? So my mother's Venezuelan and it's really fascinating to see the way that the Spanish conquistadors behaved in South America and the Portuguese empire behaved in South America and they come from a Catholic tradition to the way that the British empire behaved. Was that a large part of the way they behaved based on religion or was

39:15Tom Holland:there's something else to it well the the spanish are the first to discover great powers in a world that no one had imagined before um and so when they when they conquered the aztec empire and then the the inca empire they i mean i don't know if you played um you know a game like civilization

39:38Francis Foster:I played colonization. I played civilization.

39:42Tom Holland:But civilization, you know, civilization, you could end up with tanks attacking archers. Yes. And that's basically what you have because the Aztec is kind of bronze-age civilization. I mean, beautiful, fascinating, extraordinary, but collapses before everything that the Spanish bring because they're the kind of beneficiaries of thousands of years of Eurasian crops and cattle and all kinds of things like that.

40:11Tom Holland:And obviously the Spanish interpret this as an expression of kind of God's plan. They're bringing Christ to people who had previously walked in darkness.

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41:46Francis Foster:How much of it was that, were they genuinely seeking to expand in the new world for religious reasons or was there a lot of pragmatism to it, you know?

41:57Tom Holland:Obviously, it varies. The conquistadors are unbelievably brutal in the main, and if they hadn't been brutal, then they wouldn't have done what they did. They wouldn't have conquered what they ended up conquering. The lust for gold becomes notorious. It is absolutely about wanting material goods. But to imagine that the desire to win souls for Christ is simply cynical window dressing, that's a very anachronistic take. There are absolutely people who are going out there who feel that this is absolutely part of God's plan. And there are friars, of whom the most famous is a guy called Bartolome de las Casas, who condemns the oppression and the greed of the conquistadors as an offense against God.

43:08Tom Holland:and there is a great kind of scholarly debate in Spain between those who are drawing on Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, to essentially, you know, the strong do what they will, the weakness, suck it up kind of argument that there are those who are destined to be slaves and there are those who are destined to be masters and they're drawing on Greek philosophy for that. And then there is Las Casas who's saying, no, he's drawing on the Gospels. He's saying slavery is an evil. These are people who are as worthy of respect as anyone else who has been one for Christ. They must be one for Christ.

43:45Tom Holland:And you can see there the beginnings of ideas that will feed ultimately into notions of international law. and that's a Catholic perspective the British obviously are Protestant and therefore they bring a slightly different perspective one perspective is that the Spanish are evil

44:08Francis Foster:so what they call the black legend

44:11Tom Holland:the idea that the Spanish are uniquely appalling which is often their drawing on Las Casas and other Spanish writers like him to kind of condemn the Spanish. I mean, it's very much kind of Protestant black propaganda, I think. But the British have their own route to deciding that slavery is wrong. It's as Christian as the Spanish one, but it's distinctively Protestant. And what you have with the kind of radical form of Protestantism that develops in England in the Civil War and then the Commonwealth and its aftermath, is this notion that the Spirit descends on you and enables you to read Scripture in the way that it's meant to be properly understood.

45:01Tom Holland:So the simple words on the page, you know, this is inadequate to properly understand it. You have to have the Spirit. You have to be granted grace by the Spirit, by God. And when you do that, then you can see what it properly means. And this revolution in England is transported to the Caribbean and it's transported to the American colonies. And so Quakers are the most obvious example, but Baptists and people like that. and this coincides with the development of plantation slavery in the Caribbean and in the American colonies and this Britain is starting to industrialize by this point and industrialization is about utilizing resources in a way that is more intensive than has ever been done before and what that means for slaves is obviously horrendous because you industrialize the process of transporting slaves, of exploiting them, of working them.

46:10Tom Holland:So you have the conjunction of that, the industrialization of slavery, and this radical notion that you can only understand God's purpose by reading the Scriptures with a sense of the Spirit. And it combines to inspire in Quakers and evangelical Anglicans a sense that slavery is wrong, even though famously, notoriously even, nowhere in the Bible does it say that slavery is wrong. slavery is taken for granted in the Bible because it's seen as, you know, in the way the fact that hunger is or poverty or homelessness or whatever. It's just part of the human condition. But radical Protestants in the 18th century and then into the early 19th century are saying, no, actually, it may not say this, but I feel the Spirit is telling me slavery is wrong.

47:00Tom Holland:And it spreads like a wildfire. And the Spirit is conceptualized by Christians as fire, Pentecostal fire. So it's literally a Pentecostal fire blazing across the Atlantic in Britain, in the Caribbean, in the North American colonies, particularly in the Northern colonies. And it inspires the first great activist movement in Britain. You have people writing to their MPs. You have demonstrations going through the streets of London demanding the abolition of slavery. And it becomes so unignorable for the government that in 1814 Napoleon has been defeated and sent off to Elba. This is Congress in Vienna to redraw the map of Europe.

47:44Tom Holland:And Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, has to go to Vienna and basically say, guys, I'm really sorry, but I've got all these guys who are, you know, people in London who are holding street demonstrations and things. We've got to sort this that, we've got to abolish the slave trade. And this carries on even through Waterloo and the second defeat of Napoleon. And the Protestant tradition that Castlereagh is representing obviously means nothing to the Catholic powers, to the French, to the Spanish, to the Portuguese. So they draw on those traditions that Las Casas had been articulating, so Catholic traditions, and it gets blended with the Protestant traditions.

48:26Tom Holland:And so also do the radical traditions of the revolution, the French Revolution, kind of the radicalism of that. Because the French Revolution had abolished slavery in the Caribbean and then Napoleon had brought it back in. So essentially it's a pooling of these three traditions, all of which are bred of the marrow of Christian Europe, the Protestant, the Catholic, and the kind of the Enlightenment tradition if you want to call it that. And this is what gives birth essentially to the concept of international law, the idea that there are principles that transcend religious doctrine, so that a Protestant and a Catholic can equally accept the dictates of international law.

49:14Tom Holland:And this is what enables British ships when they are patrolling the Atlantic, that gives them the legal right to stop Portuguese or Spanish slave ships and arrest those who are doing it and say, put them on coast of Cuba and try them under international law. And it also provides a rubric for what then happens in the 19th century when the British start to go on the attack against the Muslim slave trade, because of course, Muslims have very different sanctions for slavery. And so the process by which Muslim powers come to accept that slavery is an evil kind of requires them to accept the primacy of international law, which is a massive, massive deal for Muslims because they have a framework of law that derives supposedly from God.

50:03Tom Holland:So it's much trickier for them than it is for Christians, because Christians don't have that notion of a God-given corpus of laws that have come from God. But essentially, that is the framework of international law that governs, you know, upholds notions of human rights and so on to this day. Tom, when you were talking about the fact that it was a religious movement that spread like wildfire that helped to eradicate, well, for the British Empire to stop using slaves and to eradicate slavery in the empire, it made me think, and I'm only going to touch on it briefly, with the way that the woke movement talked about slavery and how we were the beneficiary of slavery, which to a certain extent we are.

50:50But the way they talked about it was in the form of original sin. Yes. We are born into this sin and we are never going to be washed clean and is an indenable stain on our reputation and fundamentally our souls as well. Well, so I think what happens is that slavery comes to be seen as the great sin.

51:18Tom Holland:I mean, it's clearly a monstrous, appalling crime. But we judge that by Christian standards. We accept it as an appalling crime because we have bought into the assumptions of Las Casas or the Quakers or whatever. However, if you look at the entirety of global history, it's not in any way a moral given. Civilizations have always depended upon the exploitation of the masses, and that could be chattel slavery of the kind that you have in Greece and Rome and then in the Atlantic in the 18th century. Or it could be founded on caste, the idea that certain people are born to be inferior. or it could be upon the exploitation of proletariats, which you get from 19th century industrial civilization.

52:08Tom Holland:There is no form of civilization that is not also a reflection of barbarism, is the famous quotation. I'm paraphrasing, I can't remember it exactly, but it's all to Benjamin comment. So there's always been exploitation. The idea that slavery is therefore not just an unfortunate corollary of the way of things, but a moral stain that has to be eradicated is very, very novel. and because it's because it happened um in a uniquely horrible form in the atlantic and because it was christians who who drove that to a degree it contaminated i think the kind of christian record in the eyes of of of people who were themselves absolutely saturated with Christian assumptions.

53:07Tom Holland:And it kind of bled into anti-imperialism moving into the 20th century. Again, the idea that powerful countries shouldn't dominate weak countries. The history of the world is basically the record of empires. The idea that empires are problematic, to use a favorite phrase of the woke is, again, a relatively recent one. And it's meant that Christianity, which is a universal religion, Christians believe that it's for the good of the world that everyone becomes a Christian. There are more Christians than any other kind of practicing ideology in the world. That has come to be seen by lots of people as itself, evil.

54:01Tom Holland:The evangelical impetus of Christianity is seen as going out and overthrowing the right of the Aztecs to do what they want, even if that is human sacrifice or Or, you know, whatever. And so the consequence of that is that today we remain the heirs of these Christian impulses, the notion that slavery is an evil. but Christianity has been implicated in that and so therefore the

54:40Tom Holland:the institutional character of Christianity is often rejected as part of the problem, a part of what has to be rejected even though it is that institutional structure that has provided people with the ideological framework that enables them to judge it as evil And so I think what you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement. I mean, something that the Quakers in the 18th century would have recognized. The kind of the line of dissent from the activism of Quakers in the 18th century is very, very clear. That's what they're doing. But because they have jettisoned the Christian scripture, the Christian practice, the Christian self-identification that had provided structure for the Quakers and the early activists, they essentially have to construct their own traditions.

55:32Tom Holland:And so that's why you had all the toppling of statues, which is kind of a very Protestant thing to do, toppling idols, taking the knee, people, you know, offering themselves up as penitentials, white people. It's very, very, these are very, very Christian forms of practice. it's just that they have been divorced from the institutional framework that gave them birth. And so how and where they're developing is unclear. And I think that they are clearly mutating very fast because once you unmoor ideas and stories and traditions from the context that gave them birth, they can mutate very, very quickly.

56:22Francis Foster:It's very interesting you mention that because we had a super viral, very popular interview we did with a journalist called Richard Minnerton, which we talked about some of the ideas from Albion Seed, the idea of how the United States became what it became. And one of the things he explained to us, I think this may have been off camera, was how many of these work ideas originate from the very areas of America where the Quakers would have once settled. Very interesting. But moving on, one of the other great religions that I think we are incredibly uneducated about, and I speak for myself above anyone else here in the Western world, particularly is Islam.

56:56Francis Foster:And it's becoming a bigger conversation politically and societally because of immigration policy, because the number of Muslim followers, followers of Islam in the Western world is growing. And I'd love to know more about how that religion came into being, what are its core values, what are its principles. You mentioned some of them already, but can you expand on that?

57:16Tom Holland:Could I just, before I do that, just put Islam in the context of the Christian story as manifested in the present West? Because I think that's important to understand why there are tensions between Islam and Western secular liberalism and why there is such a reluctance to acknowledge this on the part of enthusiasts for secular liberalism. Because essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular. and this goes right the way back to ultimately, I mean, you can trace it to the story of Jesus being asked whether taxes should be paid to Caesar. He's famously asked for a coin and there's the picture of Caesar and he says, whose head is this?

58:07Tom Holland:And he says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's. And so that sense that there is...

58:14Francis Foster:You're talking about the separation of what the Americans call church and state. And we call it here church and state.

58:21Tom Holland:The notion of church and state, there isn't synagogue and state, there isn't mosque and state, it's church and state. And in the West, that's because this notion of there being two rival orders gets enshrined by the towering theological genius in the Latin church, Augustine, in North Africa in the late 4th, early 5th century AD. and this is against the backdrop of the collapse of Roman power. Rome has been sacked and there are Romans who say this is because we have rejected the old order, the old customs that enabled us to keep the gods on side. So, you know, going back to that stuff I was saying about Athens, these rituals, these festivals are like kind of insurance payments to keep the gods happy and now we've abandoned these and the Romans call these religiones.

59:06Tom Holland:So, you know, a sacrifice or a festival in honour of a god is a religio. It's a bond that joins you to a god and is a kind of guarantee that this god will then look after the city. And these religiones have been abandoned. And Augustine says, no, not a bit of it. And the reason for that is that everything in the fallen world is bound upon what he calls the cyclum, which is basically the span of human life. But It means the notion that everything is doomed to pass away. All things must pass, as George Harrison would put it.

59:46Tom Holland:And he says that this is true of empires as well as of individuals. Rome is not permanent. Rome has no special significance. It will pass away. It is bound upon the cyclum. If you want eternity, you must bind yourself to the pure eternity of heaven. That's what the real religio is. And it's only the church that can give you this religio. So there you have, as the Roman Empire falls, this notion of there being an order of the cyclum, the order of religio. And over the course of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized. And going into the Reformation and into modernity, it mutates to become this idea that there is this space called the secular, which is kind of neutral.

1:00:32Tom Holland:It's separated from what has come to be called religion. And this is a mad idea. No other culture has ever had this idea. So when you read about ancient Greek religion, they had no concept of religion. And they certainly had no concept of religion as being something that is separate from everything else. The relationship of people to the gods is like the the gin in a tonic you can't separate out the gin and the tonic what what what christianity does is to say yeah you can have gin and here's the tonic and you can separate them out that's that's the madness of of the way that we conceptualize the world in the west and islam that has no concept that you can separate this and so this means therefore yeah that what we have in the west is an idea that you have freedom of religion.

1:01:26Tom Holland:And Jews in the 19th century had freedom of religion in the wake of the French Revolution. They are told, you know, you can practice your religion as you want. Jews didn't have religion. They were a people. But they're being told, if you want to become the citizens of the French Republic, that's brilliant. But you can no longer define yourself as a citizen of Israel. You are now a French citizen who practices what comes to be called Judaism as a religion. And so Jews in the 19th and in the 20th century have to adapt their traditions to fit this very specific modern Western secular template. And Western secular democracies require Muslims to do the same, to conceptualize what they belong to as being a religion.

1:02:15Tom Holland:But classically, that's not how Muslims understood it. Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life. There are rules that govern every aspect of your existence. God is manifested in everything that you do. The idea that there are kind of safe spaces where everyone can meet up and join in a secular space is something completely alien. And I don't think that most kind of enthusiasts for liberal secularism understand this. They tend to, I think they think that the notion of the secular is something that is common to everybody. That it's kind of like, you know, everyone has a sense of what a tree is, everyone has a sense of what a dog is, everyone has a sense of what the secular is.

1:03:02Tom Holland:They don't. And so Muslims are being forced in, when they come to the West, are being forced into this kind of Procrustean bed of the secular notion of what a religion is.

1:03:11Francis Foster:The only reason I keep trying to interject is I'm trying always to convert what you're saying into simpler, more easier to understand language. And I guess what you're saying is the central tension there is, theologically speaking, Islam doesn't allow the separation of politics and Islam. If you are a Muslim... Well, classically, it hasn't. That's why I said theologically speaking. There are, of course, individual people who are able to do so. But within the way that the religion is, if you follow that faith, then that faith It controls everything. It controls the way you participate in society, the way you live your life, and the way you might vote in a society.

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1:05:44Tom Holland:the prophets he has brought god's last message and the quran is a record of um humanity's disobedience to prophets prophets arrive they reveal god's wishes they then ignore it or they corrupt god's message or whatever and so more prophets have to come muhammad is the last prophet And what he teaches mankind is mankind's last hope. If Islam goes, then mankind is doomed. Everyone will go to hell. So it's absolutely existential stakes. and the proof that Islam is true, again classically, is that Islam is triumphant for most of its existence. I mean it pulverizes the Sasanian Empire, it dismembers the Roman Empire, conquers vast swathes of the Christian world, the kind of ancient Christian heartlands of Mediterranean Christianity and it's really only with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the very end of the 18th century, that Muslim powers are suddenly brought up against the fact that the despised Christian powers are incredibly powerful.

1:06:53Tom Holland:And over the course of the 19th into the 20th century, most Muslim powers come under either the direct or the indirect hegemony of Christian Western powers. And so that's a massive, massive shock, and it requires a recalibration of what Islam is. I mean, the attitude to slavery would be a classic example. The reason that the Sultan in Constantinople is willing to contemplate banning the slave trade, even though it had been legitimized by the fact that Muhammad had slaves and that the early caliphs, they were all in favor of slavery. They thought it was brilliant. and that it's mandated in Islamic scriptures.

1:07:41Tom Holland:The only reason he was willing to do that was that he needed the help of the British and the French in the Crimean War against the Russians. And so he essentially kind of employed his top scholars to try and work out a way in which, you know, this Islamic law could be squared with this radical new notion. And this has been part of the kind of the great trauma for Muslims in the modern world is how do you adapt it? And essentially what Muslims did was to kind of Protestantize themselves. So they slightly adopted the sense that it's in the heart. It may say this in the Koran, go out and crucify people who are offenders against God.

1:08:23Tom Holland:But what that actually means is that you should try and be kind to them.

1:08:28Francis Foster:That's the kind of, you know, it's the... So this is the people who say jihad is the internal struggle.

1:08:33Tom Holland:Yeah, which it kind of, I mean, that is a part of it, but it's not.

1:08:38Francis Foster:The entirety of it.

1:08:39Tom Holland:It absolutely is not part of it. But yes, absolutely.

1:08:45Tom Holland:And so you have the, you know, you look at your heart

1:08:50Francis Foster:and therefore you can adjust and adapt the legacy of Islamic scripture

1:08:56Tom Holland:for the modern world. You know, get on the right side of history, all these kind of very Protestant ideas. Or the counter reaction to that is, again, a very Protestant one, which is to go fundamentalist. Because in 20th century Protestantism, you have Protestants who are, you know, faced with Darwin and all this kind of stuff. And they say, we've got to go back and interpret the scriptures literally, which neither Christians or Muslims had ever really done. They have a very, very sophisticated, complicated, almost poetic understanding of the scriptures. But fundamentalist Protestants were saying, well, what does the Bible say?

1:09:34Tom Holland:It's inerrant. That's what we're going to do. And so Muslims also have adopted that policy. And the consequence of that has been a kind of very brutal understanding of Islam, because there's quite a lot in the Quran and in the Hadiths and in the life of Muhammad that if interpreted in a kind of brutally literal way sanctions quite a lot of bloodshed. And so that's, you know, part of the problem.

1:09:57Francis Foster:Well, quite. And this is so informative, Tom. I'm so glad we're talking about this because I'm really keen to understand this from a deep perspective. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about in this context is, how is it, is there a unique challenge for Islam to, you call it, Protestantize itself, which is to start to develop an interpretation that's more compatible with modern reality for a number of reasons, one of them being the Quran is the literal word of God and the last word of God. This is kind of the problem. You can't have a reformation if this is it, right? You can't challenge any of it.

1:10:37Tom Holland:I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset. And people don't want to admit that in a way because there's a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up. There's a kind of arrogance there. The secular civilization of the West is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it. But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as the civilization of the Christian West and a very ancient one. And for most of its existence has been much, much more powerful than the Christian world. and therefore the idea that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn't a given.

1:11:41Tom Holland:So Muslims in, say, in a country like Britain have freedom of religion, but there are lots of Muslims who do not see Islam as a religion because they see religion as a Christian category. Islam is much more than a religion. It's something that saturates every aspect of existence, and therefore they don't necessarily want that. They want to live in a world where, as has traditionally been the case, Islam is everywhere. But that is obviously something that the liberal state is not prepared to offer. So there are limits to what secularism

1:12:18Francis Foster:and liberalism can and will offer. So what's the obvious question? I mean, it's probably an unfair question to ask a historian, but where's this going? I don't know.

1:12:30Tom Holland:I'm not a prophet, unlike Mohammed. I mean, my guess is that Islam, rather in the way that Judaism has done, will accommodate itself to the host society. I mean, that's traditionally what happens, but that there will always be kickback because of what makes Islam distinctive. And also, obviously, the more Muslims there are, the more weight their voices will have. And so the more under pressure the secular assumptions of the West will come. And I don't quite know. I don't know where that would go. Because, I mean, the worry for a lot of people is it's not necessarily Islam it's that kind of very hard extremist edge of Islam that we see in this country and if you go will will that remain will it ever be weathered I mean these are impossible questions to ask because I think that's a worry for a lot of people Tom is that yeah I think it is and if there's no reformation possible then is this just a continuation well I mean I I think Islam, to a degree, has had a reformation because the reformation is all about going back to Scripture and getting rid of the kind of accretion of what's seen as superstition.

1:14:00Tom Holland:And Islam has repeatedly been doing that. It's a constant kind of summons to reform Islam. And so certainly, you know, the ideologues of the Islamic State would say that they were reformers. That's why they, for instance, completely dismiss any notion of international law. It's why they dismiss notions of human rights. It's why they think that slavery shouldn't just be allowed, but should be positively encouraged because it's in the Quran. and therefore if you want to be true to God's message, you should have slavery. I mean, that's a very, very radical minority position. But it is an example of the direction of travel that a certain understanding of the Islamic inheritance can lead people in.

1:14:51Tom Holland:And it's, you know, of course it's a worry. But I find this conversation very valuable actually because what you are actually explaining that even people who go, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in Jesus Christ, I reject all of that. But you are still a product of Christianity. Yes. And as a result of that, you look at the world, whether you accept it or not, through Christian eyes. Yes. And I don't think that people quite understand what that means, particularly when we look at religions like Islam or we look at other cultures and we're like, we're all the same. Yeah. We're not.

1:15:28Tom Holland:Well, so that is, I mean, that is the foundational principle of whatever our new religion is. This kind of, this gelded, mutated, be kind, isn't Paddington wonderful kind of post-Christianity that remains the kind of the dominant ideology. And I would say that the paradigmatic pulpit that this religion has is Thought for the Day on Radio 4's Today program, where you will have Catholic priests and Anglican bishops and rabbis and Islamic scholars and Sikhs and Hindus all preaching exactly the same message. one will give it a little bit of garnishing from the Gospels one from the Quran, one from the Bhagavad Gita or whatever but basically it's the same core message and this is

1:16:23Francis Foster:and what is that message? Be kind, diversity Be kind, it's brilliant, yes

1:16:26Tom Holland:we're all basically the same, there are many routes to God, there are many paths up the mountain. Isn't that all true? No, I don't think it's remotely true I think that I think that what What the study of history reveals, and it's why it's so fascinating, is the infinite number of ways there are to be human and the infinite number of ways there are to order a society. And that at any given time, the majority of people who live in a particular place at a particular time will assume that their way of doing things is obviously the standard way of doing it. why wouldn't you do it? And that's as true of Athenians in 5th century Athens as it is of us today in 21st century Britain.

1:17:12Tom Holland:We just assume that the way we see the world is the way that the world is, but it clearly isn't. And you just have to look at the world through the eyes of, I don't know, Protestants in the 18th century, or Muslims in the 14th century, or Aztecs in the 15th century to realise and to try and see the world through their eyes and to realise how relative one's own cultural assumptions are. I mean, it's a very powerful point. I guess the next logical question is, we've got this new religion, whatever this is, as you've said yourself, but to me it doesn't seem more a religion, it seems kind of a mishmash of ideologies with no real...

1:18:04But that is what religion is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I take...

1:18:07Francis Foster:But there is no God. But there is no God. And what I was trying to say is there doesn't seem to be a core. And I guess my question... No, it's floating.

1:18:17Tom Holland:Yes. And I guess my question is, unpleasant as it may seem, is can society last without this core to it? We will find out. I mean, I would say... That's an optimistic answer. I would say that there are many, many paths, and many paths that our society will take, because it's fracturing in all kinds of ways. There are many, many different perspectives, and those aren't just political, they're cultural, all kinds of ways. But I would say that, say, for Britain, this ancient Christian country, one path is that this kind of post-Christian Paddingtonism, if you want to call it that,

1:19:17Tom Holland:it's it's like the head of the rocket it's gone through the atmosphere all everything else underneath it has been jettisoned and now it's got the power to blast through the solar system and all that kind of all you know all the stuff that's been jettisoned is all the nonsense about the Bible and Jesus and the church it's just baggage it's gone it's drifted you know it's detritus we have now blasted out and we're going forward and And the secular principles, the liberal principles are sufficiently self-evident, self-evidently right and good that it will sustain the future evolution and development of our society for decades and centuries to come.

1:20:01Tom Holland:And therefore, it's culturally determined. I mean, it clearly derives from Christianity, but you don't need Christianity anymore to kind of provide the rocket fuel. It's going on its own way. Another option, which the history of the 20th century suggests, is that the default assumption among humans is that strength and might is right. Power does have a glamour. And this is what Nietzsche predicted. He said, when Christianity goes, there will be this great convulsion and terrifying powers will emerge. And of course, he was right because they emerged in the form of fascism. and fascism and Nazism cast such a shadow over us that we've lived in their shadow.

1:20:57Tom Holland:In a way, one of the reasons I think for the decline of institutional Christianity is that Hitler has taken the place of the devil and that a modern liberal now, rather than ask what would Jesus do, as a Victorian forebear would have done, says what would Hitler do and does the opposite. And that's kind of kept us on our liberal straight and narrow. But that is clearly fading as the experience of fascism in Europe dies out, lived experience of it. So the bogeyman power of Hitler will fade. And people who are no longer bounded by Christian inhibitions or assumptions, I can imagine them turning around and saying, well, what's wrong with it?

1:21:42Tom Holland:Why shouldn't I do what I like? I'm very rich. I'm very powerful. Why shouldn't I do exactly what I like? And it's not obvious what the answer to that is, I think, if you don't have the Christian answers. And I suppose a third possibility is that people will return to the source and say, well, actually, maybe I am Christian. Maybe I should take this a bit more seriously than I have been. And there are, I think, tentative signs that that might be happening.

1:22:13Francis Foster:What's fascinating is, I would argue, there are signs of all three of those things happening. Of course, and that's what I'm saying, is that all of these things might be happening.

1:22:20Tom Holland:And of course, we will also have the growth of Islam, so that also provides a fourth option. And quite how all these different traditions will cope with each other. You know, it's going to be interesting. But doesn't it also... He seems very excited about this for reasons that are beyond me. Well, you know, I think we're living through one of the... You're going to get some fascists. You're going to get the rise of Islam.

1:22:45Francis Foster:You're going to get these woke idiots running around ruining everything. And what was the other one? Oh, the resurgence of Christianity. I think that's the one I'm most happy with.

1:22:53Tom Holland:I think we are living through a great choke point in the history of this country and of this continent more generally.

1:23:01Francis Foster:And Western civilization. Yeah, absolutely.

1:23:04Tom Holland:And, you know, in terms of British history, we've had periods where the culture of, say, just looking specifically at England, has radically changed. The Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, I think that we are on the verge of going through something similar now. I don't know where it's going to go. People in 1790 looking at Birmingham or Manchester would have had no idea where that was going, but everything changed and maybe we're on the verge of going through something similar now. Well, at least you said it with a smile on your face, Tom.

1:23:47Francis Foster:Yeah, brilliant. But I was going to say just one thing. Doesn't this talk about an arrogance of our culture? But all cultures are arrogant.

1:23:56Tom Holland:Right. I was going to say that. They are. But aren't we especially arrogant to think we can divorce society?

1:24:02Francis Foster:No, that's your arrogance showing, mate. Yes. Am I not really special about thinking I'm special? Yeah, I am special. Mother said so. No, she didn't. But I was going to say... Explains the comedy career, mate. But thinking that we can... Surely, aren't we the only society that has ever thought we can divorce culture and religion? Yes, we are. Is that not arrogant?

1:24:27Tom Holland:Yeah, it is arrogant. But the arrogance, people would say that's justified because of the fact that we have the most... We're the products of an incredibly advanced civilization that's industrialized and therefore basically we've got the answer. And I think obviously that now rubs up against all kinds of anxieties about Western exceptionalism. But I think it does. The idea that our secular liberal society is uniquely advanced. To be progressive is itself a very Western thing. And if you're progressive, you're progressing ahead of everybody else. A sense of arrogance is baked into that word. I would argue.

1:25:12Francis Foster:Well, it's going to be a very interesting time. Tom, thank you so much. It's always such a pleasure speaking with you. We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters, which they've submitted. But before we do, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Tom answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our sub stack. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this. What's required in the character traits of a historian to engage hostile audiences with their most controversial academic insights.

1:25:44Francis Foster:Is Christianity's resurgence in the West a response to Islam's growing presence? What has Tom changed his mind about during his career?

1:25:57Tom Holland:Well, have you talked about the cultural and social significance of sport?

1:26:05Francis Foster:We have not.

1:26:07Tom Holland:I think that because we've just had this incredible climax to a cricket series. And I went on the Today programme this morning to talk about it and was reminded... I went to the Oval yesterday where it was played and the sense of tension was unbearable. And I'd been through this quarterfinal in the Champions League where Villa, who we were talking about earlier, had played against PSD. and that also had been so excruciating. And I realized that these are the two moments where I have lived most fully this year. And that is, I am just one person among millions, perhaps billions, who share in experiences like that.

1:26:51Tom Holland:And it is obviously part of an enormous, vast, global, industrialized construct. I mean, it's enormous. And the way that this has evolved, the fact that we take it for granted, it suddenly struck me. This is very odd. This is something I've always taken for granted that actually is very, very strange and unusual. So maybe something on that.

1:27:20Francis Foster:Excellent. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Tom your questions. Apocalyptic millenarian cults have played an important part of Western Christianity's history and culture. Do you see any similarities in today's movements which would indicate the emergence of such cults in the present day?