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Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a controversial book written by historians 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. It suggests that the traditional accounts given for early Islamic history are a fabrication of 8th century authors. Crone and Cook argue that the Arab conquests were carried out by peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by Jewish messianism; they allied with the Jews to try to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantines. Crone and Cook claim that the Islamic sacred text, the Qur'an, is the product of 8th century editing of materials taken from a multitude of Judeo-Christian and Middle-Eastern sources and not, as Muslims claim, the exact words of the prophet Muhammad.

Crone and Cook have not allowed any reprint of the book, and their later works tacitly abandon many of the hypotheses of Hagarism. However, they have not publicly repudiated their early work.

Synopsis

Hagarism is the name which the authors coined to describe the religion of Muhammad in its formative period. They take this name from a term used by some 7th century non-Muslim historians, Hagarenes, or descendents of Hagar. Hagar was supposedly a slave concubine of the Biblical figure Abraham; her son by Abraham, Ishmael, was and is claimed as the progenitor of the Arabs. This claim -- still accepted by Muslims -- makes Jews the descendents of Abraham by his wife Sarah, and Arabs his descendents by Hagar. In choosing this term Crone and Cook emphasize the connection between Muslims and Jews.

The book starts from the premise that even the earliest Muslim accounts of the formation of Islam are later inventions, created to justify the Arab conquests and provide the new Arab overlords with a prophet and a sacred text. The earliest accounts were written at least 150 years after the events they purport to describe, and most accounts were written even later. Crone and Cook proposed to abandon the dubious Arabic texts and base their work on contemporary non-Muslim accounts, inscriptions, coins, and archaeological and philological evidence. The authors say:

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.

Reactions

• John Wansbrough, who had mentored 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 claiming, "the authors; erudition is extraordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient." However, he later comments that "...most, if not all, have been or can be challenged on suspicion of inauthenticity" and that "the material is upon occasion misleadingly represented..."

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."

• van Ess criticised the book for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..."

• Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991) pp. 84-85, writes: "The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted."

• Eric Manheimer in The American Historical Review said he found the research to be thorough even if some terminology was confusing; he 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 Western Islamic scholars believe that Islam borrowed from Jewish, Christian, and other traditions.

• 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 possibly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish were as intimate as they would wish them to have been."

• Oleg Grabar writes that "...the authors' fascination with lapidary formulas led them to cheap statements or to statements which require unusual intellectual gymnastics to comprehend and which become useless, at best cute." and that "...the whole construction proposed by the authors lacks entirely in truly historical foundations."

• Michael G. Morony remarked that "Despite a useful bibliography, this is a thin piece of Kulturgeschichte full of glib generalizations, facile assumptions, and tiresome jargon. More argument than evidence, it suffers all the problems of intellectual history, including reification and logical traps."

• In 2006, Liaquat Ali Khan claimed that Crone and Cook have explicitly disavowed their earlier book . However, neither scholar has publicly confirmed his assertions.

Despite the generally negative reception given the specific assertions in the book, the authors' criticism of what they saw as credulous reliance upon biased Islam histories has been widely influential. Subsequent histories of early Islam have usually referred to Hagarism, if only to refute it. Even though the book is out-of-print and no longer widely available, it still features in many academic bibliographies and reading lists.

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. van Ess "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Supplement, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998
4. 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)
5. Eric I. Manheimer. "Review". The American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1. (Feb., 1978), pp. 240-241
6. Introduction to Islam, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-42929-3, pp 273-274
7. Grabar, Oleg. Speculum, Vol. 53, No. 4. (Oct., 1978), pp. 795-799.
8. Morony, Michael G. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2. (Apr., 1982), pp. 157-159.
9. Liaquat Ali Khan. "Hagarism: The Story of a Book Written by Infidels for Infidels". Retrieved 2006-06-12.
10. Liaquat Ali Khan. "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.

Further reading

• The Historical Problem of Islamic Origins

• 1977 books
• Islamic studies books