In Depth:  Gordon Robertson

Dear Sir,

Thank you for the review of Tom Holland’s latest book. By coincidence I was reading his book In the Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland is one of the very few popular historians brave enough to be forthright about the virtually total lack of contempor-ary evidence for Mohammed, the origins of Islam, and the Qur’an. This book is worth getting for Chapter 1 alone. There is ‘not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his fol-lowers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two cen-turies that followed his death’. Biographical details start to occur after 800AD, written by fervent believers. ‘Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the pre-sumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted’, and this includes stories about the creation of the Qur’an. The chapter goes on to look at the ideas floating about at that time, and the book traces in historical detail how the world came to be dominated by three religions with one God. His Channel 4 documentary ‘Islam: the untold story’ is still available on YouTube.

Dear Sir,

I really enjoyed Adrian Reynolds article in the June issue of en on eating together. However, I was surprised no-one men-tioned the new book Simply Eat published by Instant Apostle. This lovely coffee table book is full of stories, testimonies, pictures, recipes, and encouragements to do exactly what Adrian recommends. It’s a book to enjoy, to give, and most of all to help one put into practice the art of hospitality for Jesus’s sake.