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| On April 6, 2006, I interviewed Professor Patricia Crone as well to see what she thinks about the book, Hagarism. She was even more candid in repudiating the central thesis of the book. She said that she agrees with the critics that the book was "a graduate essay." "We were young, and we did not know anything." "The book was just a hypothesis, not a conclusive finding," said Professor Crone. "I do no think that the book's thesis is valid." | |||
| Ali Khan | |||
| Professor of Law | |||
| Washburn University | |||
| Topeka, Kansas | |||
Revision as of 23:56, 7 April 2006
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a book by scholars of the Middle East Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.
The book presents a study of the roots of the Islamic religion and culture in Judeo-Christian ideas, Greek philosophy, Roman law and Persian statehood.
Hagarism begins on the premise that Western historical scholarship on Islam's beginnings should be based on the highest standards of historical and archeological and philological research rather than rely on the account of traditional Islamic mythos which has had a tendency to weave dogmatically-based historically irreconcilable and anachronistic accounts of the community's past. Thus, relying exclusively on historical, archeological and philological evidence the authors reconstructs and present what they argue is a historically accurate and supported account of Islam's origins.
Historian Daniel Pipes states:
- In Hagarism, a 1977 study by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, the authors completely exclude the Arabic literary sources and reconstruct the early history of Islam only from the information to be found in Arabic papyri, coins, and inscriptions as well as non-Arabic literary sources in a wide array of languages (Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac). This approach leads Crone and Cook in wild new directions. In their account, Mecca's role is replaced by a city in northwestern Arabia and Muhammad was elevated "to the role of a scriptural prophet" only about a.d. 700, or seventy years after his death. As for the Qur'an, it was compiled in Iraq at about that same late date."
The early chapters of the book contend that early Islam was a derivation of Messianic Judaism, whose aim was to conquer the Holy Land from the Byzantines with an army composed of Jews and Arabs. The term 'hagarism' refers to the way Muhammad justified the inclusion of the Arabs by emphasizing the common ancestry of the Jews and Arabs from Abraham, through Sarah for the Jews and Hagar for the Arabs. Eventually Arabs splintered off from the Jews, and Hagarism continued to develop into what is now Islam: a blend of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity.
Although this line of research is discounted by Islamic traditionalists, Western scholars have generally applauded Crone and Cook's advances in tracing the origins of Islam.
See also
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