When I Questioned the History of Muhammad - WSJ:
"The collapse of Roman power in the Near East was the flip side of another story: the rise of Islam.
The Arab armies who seized from the Romans the provinces of Palestine, Syria and Egypt were Muslim, according to traditional historiography, and had been inspired to their remarkable feats of conquest by the revelations of a prophet, Muhammad.
It took me only a cursory immersion in the scholarship of the period to realize that these presumptions were (to put it mildly) widely contested.
Indeed, it was hard to think of another field of history where quite so much was up for grabs.
...Never before, though, had it—or, indeed, any other British TV channel—aired a documentary questioning the basis of what most Muslims believed about the origins of their faith.
I still remember a feeling of almost physical panic as I stood on the battlements of an abandoned Roman city in the Negev Desert and raised the possibility, on camera, that Muhammad might not have come from Mecca.
The director, the brilliant and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Sim, had aimed to make me and my anxieties about what I was doing a part of the film, and he more than succeeded.
There is barely a shot in the documentary in which I do not look mildly terrified.
......I felt tolerably confident that no one would get too upset.
It didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake.
Just a few minutes into the broadcast, my Twitter stream was going up in smoke.
By the time the show ended, the death threats were coming in thick and fast—and not just against me but against my family as well.
Channel 4 was also deluged with protests.
...Two weeks later, I was still fielding death threats...
It was the one time that I seriously imagined I might end up as the new Salman Rushdie.
...At a conference organized by Oxford University to discuss my book and film, I was asked what lessons I had learned.
The chief one, I answered, was that the
freedom to write history without intimidation was no longer something that I took for granted. But I also had learned that it was possible, when my work came under attack, to defend it without yielding to threats....
—Mr. Holland is the author of “Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic” and “In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire.” His new translation of “The Histories” of Herodotus is published by Penguin Classics. His documentary, “Islam: The Untold Story,” is available online in the U.K.
Previewing the hottest-year-on-record announcements, Oreskes wrote in the New York Times last week that we were underreacting to the reality of dangerous climate change “now unfolding before our eyes.” 
