It took a couple of chapters to realize the artistry of this book. Others have described it as indirect and meandering. I found these features and not bugs once I realized what Mr. Holland was doing. History books are often strictly chronological, or divided by theme in ways that impose hard stops and breaks between subjects or periods. This book is quite the opposite of that, and in that lies its elegance and artfulness, rare qualities in the genre of history.At first I found the introduction indirect and was uncertain what it was intending. It is a wide-ranging narrative of the challenges and obscurities of the origins of Islamic verse. And then it struck me that he was laying out, brick by brick, several cases at once. First that the origins of Islam are far more obscure than are commonly acknowledged, second that understanding this obscurity is quite under-developed, especially among Islamic scholars, and third that this was a feature, not a bug of Islam in the context of the Rashidun and Ummayyad Caliphates. His contention is that this obscurity can at least partly be answered by the context of late antiquity in which Islam arose.This naturally flows to his depiction of late antiquity. Starting in Persia, his narrative does not spell out the points he wants to lay out as would a history professor, but rather leaves you to realize several points at once-- the political evolution of the Persian State that progressed toward eclipse by Islam in the 7th century, and the religious/political interactions that drove that progression. Simultaneously he hints at those things that are too conveniently common to Zoroaster and Persia's Islamic conquerors. Then, the magic carpet flies with Khavad and Khosrau to Constantinople to do much the same with the Byzantine Romans, all the while demonstrating the rich currents of Persia and Byzantium into which Muhammad and his Sahabah stepped. His narrative of Judaism hints at the distinctiveness of its doctrine and the promises it makes to its followers. It then flows into early Christianity, showing that its evolution from and revolution away from Judaism in a form both obvious and relatable. All of this builds up a world into which Islam steps, stripped of obscurity, naturally and consequently from what came before.This book brings to life the semi-mystical world of late antiquity and contextualizes the first Muslims as well as those they conquered. Despite it being a relatively short book of no great density of dates, places, doctrines, etc., it is not a simple book. A reader would benefit from some awareness of the late classical period to ground what Mr. Holland is doing and appreciate the connections he makes. Several chapters of Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome" would benefit readers, and for the ambitious, appropriate portions of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, moralizing, sneering prejudice, and all the rest.