The idea that history should be written without bias is itself a biased one: Thomas Holland

The exercise to examine the past and compose history is fraught with friction. The tools that a historian wields — an appetite for the truth, faded memories, conflicting narratives, fragments of puzzles that ask to be pieced together and research in want of endorsement — are seldom precise, scarcely accurate and mostly biased. The endeavour guarantees the risk of alienation and threats to the historian; something that British author and historian Thomas Holland learnt after his 2012 documentary, suggestively titled, Islam: The Untold Story, drew criticism from the moderates and extremists.
But Holland, a cricket enthusiast whose body of work ranges from Herodotus and dinosaurs to the Persian wars, views writing history more as an "expression of a human culture, rather than a revealed truth". Holland, who was in India last month for the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, responds to questions on authenticity of sources to why it is a difficult task to document religion.

Is history a precise science?
No, because the understanding of what history should properly be is never stable. It is always evolving, and always mediated by the cultural presumptions that individual historians bring to the practise of writing it.

What are the essential traits that a historian must possess?
The most vital of all is curiosity – which is implicit in the very word 'history'. When Herodotus, the first historian, began his great work explaining how the Persians and Greeks had come to fight their terrible war, he called it 'historia', meaning 'enquiries'. There are other essential traits too, of course. A concern always to be true to the facts as they can be ascertained; a recognition that people in the past lived by different standards; an obligation to get things right about the dead; a sensitivity to what shapes primary sources. All these are crucial. But I repeat — the greatest virtue of all in a historian is curiosity!

You've documented different phases of history. How do you ascertain the quantity and quality of sources or of source material?
I generally write about ancient history, which means that the sources are almost always — by the standards of modern recent history — unreliable. This is not just because they are written often decades, and sometimes centuries, after the events they purport to describe, but because they tend to embody prejudices and perspectives that condition what is being said. The key to writing good ancient history is to recognise that what distorts a source will often be profoundly revelatory in its own right. Between what a source claims, and the reasons that it might be making that claim, there is fertile terrain to explore!

Is it possible to have one version of history without bias, without the perspective of the one commissioning the documentation?
No. The very idea that history should be written without bias is itself a biased one. No historians can ever hope to abstract themselves from the presumptions that condition what they are doing. All they can do is argue for the validity of the methods that they bring to the task, and be true to their best understanding of what history should be, and what actually happened.

There's been much debate here in India over the Central government's attempts to rewrite history textbooks, and even embellish them, to inculcate pride in Hinduism. What do you make of such attempts by governments (and there's precedence for this) to tweak history to suit vested interests?
It's not for me as a foreigner to tell Indians how they should or shouldn't represent their history! Which said, my perspective is that gilding accounts of a country's past to convey a particular message is never as interesting as attempting to scrape away the accretions of centuries, and see what may lie underneath. India's history is more than rich enough as it is, more than fascinating and extraordinary. It doesn't need to be re-written. The closer you get to the truth of what happened in ancient India, the more remarkable its achievements will come to seem.

One of your shows, Islam: The Untold Story, was criticised, attracted controversy and even personal threats. Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was banned in India after severe protests. Similarly, works that question Christianity have attracted brickbats. What is it about religion that makes it so difficult to scrutinise in a scientific manner?
It's because religions tend to fashion back-stories for themselves that believers who are not necessarily interested in the past for its own sake then have an immense emotional stake in. The most challenging field of ancient history to study is invariably a culture or empire that succeeded in fashioning histories for itself that still has an emotional hold on people today. Question the degree to which the Iliad is history, and no one will mind; question the Ramayana, and it is a more sensitive business. Similarly, question the degree to which great Greek law-givers such as Lycurgus or Solon were figures of history or myth, and no one will get hot under the collar: apply the same methodology to Jesus or Muhammad, and all kinds of people will get upset.

You received threats following Islam: The Untold Story which offended a section of Muslims. As did the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose cartoonists were brutally killed last month. What was your frame of mind when you heard about the Paris attack?
We all have values, and mine – when I write history – derive from the European Enlightenment. I consciously follow in the footsteps of Edward Gibbon, whose history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was the first to treat Christianity as an expression of human culture, rather than revealed truth. I am neither a satirist nor French, and so the traditions of Voltairean mockery embodied by Charlie Hebdo are foreign to me, but I recognise them as people, who, like me, are inspired on the intellectual level by values derived from the Enlightenment. To that extent, I felt their murder as a blasphemy.

In Islam: The Untold Story, you say that there is little evidence to back up the claim that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia. Would you be able to say where, and how, it did originate?
The problem with the Qur'an, if you approach it as a historian rather than a believer, is that the traditional account of its appearance is incredible — depending as it does on divine intervention. It is a text that clearly derives from the seedbed of the late antique Near East: it is full of biblical prophets, it echoes Jewish and Christian texts, and it even features the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and Alexander the Great. So what are these elements of the Qur'an doing there? If you're a Muslim, there's no problem: they derive from God. If you're not a Muslim, though, you need to come up with an alternative explanation. Bearing in mind that internal evidence suggests an agriculturalist context for the Qur'an's emergence, and that a whole array of external evidence points to the well-spring of Abrahamic cults being Palestine and the deserts that abut it, I think that Muhammad is likelier to have come from the vicinity of Petra than Mecca. Many elements in the Qur'an are very ancient and seem to point towards the preservation over centuries of Jewish-Christian traditions that had been forgotten elsewhere. I think that these then synthesised with the calamitious events of the early 7th century to precipitate what began as an apocalyptic cult, and ended up, two centuries later, as the religion of a great world empire. The problem is, though, that between the time when Muhammad is supposed to have lived and the oldest surviving biography of him, we have almost two centuries without sources written by people whom we would today recognise as Muslim. That makes it very difficult, if you think there is a problem with the traditional Muslim account of Islam's emergence, to get to the truth of what might actually have happened.

Finally, your body of work encompasses a wide range of subjects — from dinosaurs to religion — how do you manage to keep so much information in your memory?
I don't. Things fade terrifyingly fast. But I am lucky: I have always managed to write about things that I was fascinated by as a child, and there is nothing so enduring or vivid as the memory of a childhood fascination.