Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 72.144.64.178 (talk) at 12:31, 16 July 2006 (→Traditionalist criticism: authors pre-emption). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a book by scholars and historiographers of early Islam Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.

The book presents an account of the origins of the Islamic religion and culture as documented in non-Muslim records of the 7th century which suggests that the traditional accounts given for early Islamic history are a fabrication of 8th century authors.

The historical documents presented in the book seem to indicate that the Arab conquests and the formation of the Caliphate was a movement of peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by Jewish messianism and allied with the Jews to try to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantines. The Qur'an is found to be the product of 8th century editings of materials taken from a multitude of Judeo-Christian and Middle-Eastern sources.

Defining Hagarism

Hagarism is a name which describes the religion of Muhammad in the formative period of early Islam as proposed by the authors this book. The followers of Muhammad were known as hagarenes in the 7th century referring to their biological descendancy from Abraham through his slave wife Hagar. Thus the term 'hagarism' refers to the way Muhammad justified the inclusion of his tribe in Judaism by emphasizing the common ancestry of the Jews and Arabs from Abraham, through Sarah for the Jews and Hagar for the Arabs. Eventually the Arabs splintered off from the Jews, and Hagarism continued to develop into what is now Islam: a blend of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity. In this light the mythology of Islam was born with the creation a century later of a holy text modelled on the Jewish Torah - (the Qur’an), and the fashioning a prophet like status for Muhammad based on Moses and the assigning of a sacred city (Medina) again modelled on the Jewish holy city adjacent to a holy mountain .

Thesis

Hagarism begins with the premise that Western historical scholarship on the beginnings of Islam should be based on historical, archeological and philological data rather than Islamic traditions which they find 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.

Virtually all accounts of the early development of Islam take it as axiomatic that it is possible to elicit at least the outlines of the process from the Islamic sources. It is however well-known that these sources are not demonstrably early. There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth. The historicity of the Islamic tradition is thus to some degree problematic: while there are no cogent internal grounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for accepting it. In the circumstances it is not unreasonable to proceed in the usual fashion by presenting a sensibly edited version of the tradition as historical fact. But equally, it makes some sense to regard the tradition as without determinate historical content, and to insist that what purport to be accounts of religious events in the seventh century are utilizable only for the study of religious ideas in the eighth.’ The Islamic sources provide plenty of scope for the implementation of these different approaches, but offer little that can be used in any decisive way to arbitrate between them. The only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again.

Drawing from early non-Muslim historical sources such as the Doctrina Iacobi AD 634, the authors present documents that record Muhammad preaching Judaism and proclaiming the advent of the Jewish Messiah , concluding that early Islam was a school of Messianic Judaism, whose aim was to conquer the Holy Land from the Byzantines with an army composed of Jews and Arabs. Early manuscripts suggest that Muhammad was the leader of a military expedition to conquer Jerusalem, and that the original Hijra actually referred to the journey from northern Arabia to that city.

While the full assertions of the book were controversial, the attempts to deconstruct early Islamic history make this a groundbreaking and important work in early Islamic history.

Sources

Reception

John Wansbrough, professor of the authors, reviewed the book, specifically the first part, in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. He begins by praising the book claming, "the authors; erudition is extrapordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient". He concludes that their research, while good, was used by their methodology to make too gradiose an assumption:

My reservations here, and elsewhere in this first part of the book, turn upon what I take to be the authors' methodological assumptions, of which the principal must be that a vocabulary of motives can be freely extrapolated from a discrete collection of literary stereotypes composed by alien and mostly hostile observers, and thereupon employed to describe, even interpret, not merely the overt behaviour but also intellectual and spiritual development of the helpless and mostly innocent actors. Where even the sociologist fears to tread, the historian ought not with impunity be permitted to go.

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 book is widely cited by many cotemporary historiographers and historians of early Islam and is found in the works of scholars such as Bernard Lewis , Robert G. Hoyland, Reza Aslan , G. R. Hawting, Herbert Berg, Francis Edwards Peters, S. N. Eisenstadt,Ziauddin Sardar,Malise Ruthven,Richard Landes not to mention Ibn Warraq and John Wansbrough , to name a few.

It is listed on the suggested reading list at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London. as well as most major university Middle East studies reading list ,

Traditionalist criticism

On the traditionalist side some authors have criticised the book as lacking balance to not being widely accepted, sometimes suggesting that its thesis is wrong. The authors having anticipated a rejection from the traditionalistic community stated in the introduction of their book :

There is however one particular group of readers who are in a special position. For although the characters who appear in our story are all of them dead, their descendants are very much alive. In the first place, the account we have given of the origins of Islam is not one which any believing Muslim can accept: not because it in any way belittles the historical role of Muhammad, but because it presents him in a role quite different from that which he has taken on in the Islamic tradition.

In the second place, there is a good deal in this book that may be disliked by the Muslim who has lost his religious faith but retained his ancestral pride. What we wish to stress for such a reader is that the strong evaluative overtones of the language in which we have analyzed the formation of Islamic civilization do not add up to any simplistic judgment for or against. Hagarism - Preface.

Eric Manheimer in The American Historical Review said he found the research to be thorough even if some terminology was confusing and concluded that "the conclusions drawn lack balance". The review was by no means all negative. He complimented their scrutiny of the source and agrees that most Islamic scholars believe that Islam borrowed from Jewish, Christian, and other traditions.

Generally while acknowledged as raising a few interesting questions and being a fresh approach it's reconstruction of early Islamic history has been dismissed as an experiment and criticised for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..." The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted.

David Waines, Professor of Islamic Studies Lancaster University states:

"The Crone-Cook theory has been almost universally rejected. The evidence offered by the authors is far too tentative and conjectural (and possibilly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish were as intimate as they would wish them to have been."

Legal scholar Liaquat Ali Khan posted an opinion piece on the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel website whose title "Hagarism: The Story of a Book Written by Infidels for Infidels" is based of a claim to the same in the book claimed Hagarism is "another book in the large dump of attack literature" and an attack on "the Quran’s authenticity, the Prophet’s integrity, Islamic history". He stated that he has had private correspondance with the authors and stating that Michael Cook (historian) had said, "The central thesis of that book was, I now think, mistaken. Over the years, I have gradually come to think that the evidence we had to support the thesis was not sufficient or internally consistent enough" and that Patricia Crone had said, "The book was just a hypothesis, not a conclusive finding," and "I do not think that the book's thesis is valid." Ali Khan also states, "Part of the confusion arises from the fact that Cook and Crone have made no manifest effort to repudiate their juvenile findings in the book. The authors admitted to me that they had not done it and cater no plans to do so."

References

1. J. Wansbrough. "Review". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 41, No. 1. (1978), pp. 155-156.
2. Daniel Pipes. "Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy". The Middle East Quarterly. September 1999. Volume VI: Number 3.
3. Eric I. Manheimer. "Review". The American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1. (Feb., 1978), pp. 240-241
4. van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Suppliment, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998
5. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991) pp. 84-85
6. Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. 1997. pp. p. 47. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
7. Introduction to Islam, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0 521 42929 3, pp 273-274
8. P Crone & M Cook, Hagarism: The Making Of The Islamic World, 1977, Cambridge University Press, pg. 8
9. "Hagarism: The Story of a Book Written by Infidels for Infidels". Retrieved 2006-06-12.
10. "Hagarism: The Story of a Book Written by Infidels for Infidels". Retrieved 2006-06-09.

See also

• Historiography of early Islam
• External References to Islam.

• 1977 books
• Islamic studies books