– THE SHADOW OF THE SCROLL –

When Holland interviewed Crone for his documentary last year, she seemed rather coy about repeating her earlier theory, and refused to name an alternative to Mecca. In keeping with her habit of exploding received wisdom and then rowing back, Crone has revised her two Meccas theory. In a 2007 journal article, she proposed a commodity in which the Prophet’s tribe might have traded. ‘What the author of Meccan Trade did not know, 20 years ago,’ she wrote, ‘was that the Roman Army swallowed up colossal amounts of leather.’ One legion needed 65,700 goat hides simply for tents. Mecca had pastoral regions and the Qu’ran describes cattle-skin tents that could easily be transported as ‘God’s bounty’ (16:80). If Mecca got rich by exploiting the Byzantine wars with Persia, then being outside the Palestinian war zone would have been an advantage. ‘For traders from the pastoralist regions, beyond the reach of the imperial taxation system, well away from the invasion routes and shielded by low population densities from the plague, the wars will have been a golden opportunity.’ Which is as close as Crone comes to saying Mecca might well still be Mecca.

Holland’s readings of the Qu’ran are not easy to confirm or refute. Yet the verse about the remains of Lot’s wife being visible by day and night likely includes some rhetorical exaggeration, and rare fruits and crops are surely present for the same reason that water is important to a desert religion: scarcity breeds sanctity.

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