i previously accused him of not being an expert, but he seems to have some historical training; what i meant is that he's not an expert in that time frame. rather, his expertise appears to be connected more to american and european military history, and specifically in the post-enlightenment period. so, he's approaching this as an amateur, but he seems like he should know what he's doing.
that comes out in how he approaches islamic vs western history, the latter in it's fullest generality. when he talks about western history, he has a critical mindset and a skeptical approach - as he was no doubt trained to have. but, when he approaches islamic history, he takes it nearly on face value, with only the slightest bit of critical thought. i mean, he mentions a few times that it sounds hard to believe, but then he just goes with it anyways...
so, i'm not accusing him of naivete. he doesn't seem to believe anything he's narrating.
rather, he's approaching this with kid gloves, and it's not helpful. instead, it's exposing a level of benevolent racism, in it's application of different standards of analysis. in the west, we can have critical thinking and skepticism and scientific methods, but those backwards arabs can just hold to their mythology and shouldn't be challenged on it. so, it's a hierarchy of analysis that places islam at the bottom of the academy, in terms of methodology, and it's based on othering the orient as different and exotic - and therefore not subject to western critiques.
it's for that reason that i'm trying to point out over and over again that the muslims really have never been this exotic thing. yes, they came from the outskirs of western culture, but so did the germans and the russians. their religion is not this weird foreign thing at all; they adopted a greco-semitic syncretism that was so similar to contemporary christianity that it was readily adopted by romans across wide swaths of territory, at least at first. he uncritically recounts a story where the caliph threatens heraclius with the fate of arians without realizing that the early christian sources essentially saw islam as a heretical form of christianity, and that accusations of arianism were actually fairly widespread - and reasonably grounded. that story is probably projection. so, it took some time for divisions to develop, and a bird's eye survey of the history in a broad sense should really fold islam into the history of the west, not as this distant other from the east. islam is not the east; hinduism and offshoots of it are the actual, real east.
and, if islam is a part of western culture then western methods should be used to deconstruct their histories as the myths and legends that they are.
as mentioned previously, it doesn't help that islamic histories consistently try to argue that the dark age didn't apply to them, that they existed outside of it in some kind of special status. it's obvious why they do this - this is where their civilization started, and writing it off as a dark age mythology means writing off the religion, itself. but, i mean, who cares? if it's wrong, it's wrong; if it's myth, it's myth. what do i care if it destroys their religion or not? i don't. what it masks is that their own histories are in many cases a better example of dark age ignorance than anything that happened in western europe. and, the kid gloves just reinforce the nonsense.
so, he may think he's doing them a favour, but he isn't - these different standards of analysis are racist, and we should be applying the same methods to all aspects of the dark ages, not giving the islamic side of it some kind of pass because they're different.
if i was hoping for a secular history grounded in skepticism, this isn't it. but, it's not his point of focus, and we'll have to see if he gets better or not.