 Cover of the first edition | |
| Authors | Patricia Crone Michael Cook |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | History of Islam |
| Published | 1977 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover andPaperback) |
| Pages | 277 |
| ISBN | 978-0521297547 |
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World is a 1977 book about the early history ofIslam by the historiansPatricia Crone andMichael Cook.[1] Drawing onarchaeological evidence and contemporary documents inArabic, Armenian,Coptic,Greek,Hebrew,Aramaic,Latin andSyriac, Crone and Cook depict an early Islam very different from the traditionally-accepted version derived from Muslim historical accounts.[2]
According to the authors, "Hagarenes" was a term which near-contemporary sources used to name anArab movement of the 7th century CE whose conquests and resultantcaliphate were inspired byJewish messianism. Crone and Cook contend that an alliance of Arabs andJews sought to reclaim thePromised Land from theByzantine Empire, that theQur'an consists of 8th-century edits of variousJudeo-Christian and otherMiddle-Eastern sources, and thatMuhammad was the herald ofUmar "the redeemer", a Judaic messiah.[3]
The hypotheses proposed inHagarism have been widely criticized,[2][3][4] and by 2002, the authors themselves had admitted that a lot of their hypotheses were wrong.[5][6][7] Nevertheless, the book has been hailed as a seminal work in its branch of Islamic historiography.[2][3][8][9] The book questioned prevailing assumptions about traditional sources, proposing new interpretations that opened avenues for research and discussion. It connected the history of early Islam to other areas, from Mediterraneanlate antiquity to theories ofacculturation. Following earlier critical work by Goldziher, Schacht, and Wansbrough, it challenged scholars to use a much wider methodology, including techniques already used inbiblical studies.[5] It is thus credited for provoking a major development of the field, even though it might be viewed more as a "what-if" experiment than as a research monograph.[3][10]
Cook and Crone postulate that "Hagarism" started as a "Jewish messianic movement" to "reestablish Judaism" in the Jewish Holy Land (Palestine), that its adherents were first known asmuhajirun (migrants) rather than Muslims, and that theirhijra (migration) was toJerusalem rather thanMedina. Its members were initially both Jewish and Arab but the Arabs' increasing success impelled them to break from the Jews around the time ofAbd al-Malik ibn Marwan in the late seventh century. They flirted with Christianity, learning a respect for Jesus as prophet and Mary as Virgin, before asserting an independentAbrahamic monotheist identity. This borrowed key concepts from the Jewish breakaway sect ofSamaritanism: "the idea of a scripture limited to thePentateuch, a prophet likeMoses (Muhammad), a holy book revealed like the Torah (theQuran), a sacred city (Mecca) with a nearby mountain (Jabal an-Nour) and shrine (theKaaba) of an appropriate patriarch (Abraham), plus a caliphate modeled on anAaronid priesthood."[11]
Hagarism begins with the premise thatWestern historical scholarship on the beginnings ofIslam should be based on contemporary historical,archaeological andphilological data, as is done for the study of Judaism and Christianity, rather than Islamic traditions and later Arabic writings. The tradition expresses dogma, and gives historically irreconcilable andanachronistic accounts of the community's past. By relying on contemporary historical, archaeological andphilological evidence, stressing non-Muslim sources, the authors attempt to reconstruct and present what they argue is a more historically accurate account of Islam's origins.
According to the authors,Hagarenes is a term used commonly by various sources (GreekMagaritai, SyriacMahgre orMahgraye) to describe the 7th-century Arab conquerors. The word was a self-designation of the early Muslim community with a double-meaning. Firstly, it is a cognate ofmuhājirūn, an Arabic term for those who partake inhijra (exodus). Secondly, it refers toIshmaelites: descendants ofAbraham through his handmaidHagar and their childIshmael, in the same way as the Jews claimed descent and their ancestral faith from Abraham through his wifeSarah and their childIsaac. Muhammad would have claimed such descent for Arabs to give them a birthright to theHoly Land and to prepend a monotheist genealogy compatible with Judaism to their pagan ancestral practice (such assacrifice andcircumcision).Hagarism thus refers to this early faith movement. The designation asMuslims andIslam would only come later, after the success of conquests made the duty of hijra obsolete.(pp. 8-9)
The authors, interpreting 7th century Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew sources, put forward the hypothesis that Muhammad was alive during theconquest of Palestine (about two years longer thantraditionally believed; the caliphate ofAbu Bakr was hence a later invention). He led Jews and Hagarenes (Arabs) united under a faith loosely described as Judeo-Hagarism, as a prophet preaching the coming of a Judaic messiah who would redeem thePromised Land from theChristianByzantines. This redeemer came in the person ofUmar, as suggested by the Aramaic origins of his epithetAl-Faruq (i.e. "the distinguisher [between right and wrong]").
Thehijra, the defining idea and religious duty of Hagarenes, thus referred to the emigration from northern Arabia to Palestine (later more generally to conquered territories), not to a single exodus from Mecca to Medina (in particular, "no seventh-century source identifies theArab era as that of the hijra"). Mecca was only a secondary sanctuary; the initial gathering of Hagarenes and Jews took place rather somewhere in north-west Arabia, north of Medina.
After the successful conquest of the Holy Land, Hagarenes feared that being too influenced by Judaism might result in outright conversion and assimilation.In order to break with Jewish messianism, they recognised Jesus as messiah (thoughrejecting his crucifixion), which also served to soften the initially hostile attitude towards a growing numbers of Christian subjects.However, to form a distinct identity, not conflated with either Judaism or Christianity, ancestral practice was reframed as a distinct monotheistic Abrahamic religion.It took theSamaritan scriptural position, defined as accepting thePentateuch while rejecting prophets.This also served to undermine the legitimacy of the Davidic monarchy, which the Samaritans rejected, as well as the sanctity of Jerusalem.Instead, Samaritans had had their holy city inShechem and a temple on the nearbyMount Gerizim; Mecca with itsnearby mountain were contrived as a parallel of these.
To combine the Abrahamic, Christian, and Samaritan elements, the role of Muhammad was recast as a prophet parallel toMoses,bringing a new scriptural revelation. The Quran was expeditiously collected from earlier disparate Hagarene writings, possibly heavily edited into its complete form byal-Hajjaj (that is, in the last decade of the 7th century rather than the middle, underUthman, astraditionally believed; seeOrigin according to academic historians).
The political theory of early Islam was based on two sources. The first was Samaritan high-priesthood, which joins political and religious authority and legitimises it on basis of religious knowledge and genealogy. Secondly, a resurgence of Judaic influences in Babylonian Iraq, which led to the reassertion of messianism in the form ofmahdism, especially in Shia Islam.The identification as Hagarenes was replaced with the Samaritan notion of Islam (understood as submission or as a covenant of peace), its adherents becoming Muslims.
The transition to a confident, recognisably Islamic identity, with its various borrowings assimilated, occurred in the late 7th century, during the reign ofAbd al-Malik.However, its evolution continued.As power was transferred from Syria to Iraq, Islam incorporated the rabbinical culture ofBabylonian Judaism: religious law practised by a learned laity and based on oral traditions.
In the second half of the eighth century, the earlyMuʿtazila, simultaneously withKaraite Judaism, rejected all oral traditions, leading to a failed attempt to base law onGreek rationalism. In response, scholars followedShafi'i in gathering chains of authorities (isnads) to support traditions item by item. This original solution finalised the independence of Islam from Judaism.
Part I of the book ends by considering the peculiar state in which the Hagarenes found themselves: their own success pushed them away from the sanctuaries of Jerusalem and Mecca to Babylonia, as finalised by theAbbasid Revolution; Umar had already lived and there was no lost land or freedom to hope for. This led Sunni religious politics intoquietism under a desanctified state, contrasted only with "Sufi resignation".
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The remainder of the book, Parts II and III, discuss later developments and the larger context in which Islam originated: the Late Antique Near East, and relate it to theoretical themes of cultural history.This contrasts with the usual setting, focusing almost exclusively on Arabian indigenous polytheistic beliefs (jahiliyya).[12]
The thesis ofHagarism is not widely accepted, although it won Crone praise for "erudition and lucid analysis."[9] Crone and Cook's work was part ofrevisionist history[13] arising from several scholars associated with theUniversity of London'sSchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), beginning in the 1970s. They introduced methods from biblical studies as a new way of analyzing the history of the Koran and Islam, for instance, the use of contemporary texts in languages other than that used in the holy text, and incorporating evidence from archeology and linguistics.
Hagarism was acknowledged as raising some interesting questions and being a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but it was described byJosef van Ess as an experiment.[10] He argued that a “refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it (the hypothesis of the book) in detail ... Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous."[10]
Jack Tannous, associate professor atPrinceton, called the book "brilliantly provocative" in 2011. He commented:[5]
Apart from Internet enthusiasts and religiously-motivated polemicists, nobody today, not even Cook and Crone themselves, believes that the picture of early Islam put forth inHagarism is an accurate one. But the legacy ofHagarism has endured, for in one thin little volume, Cook and Crone put their fingers on a nagging problem in an electric way. ... As a book making a specific argument, Hagarism was ultimately a failure, but in its stimulus of further research, writing, debate, and especially by challenging Islamicists to look beyond the confines of Arabic sources to the rich literatures of the Middle East that existed before, during, and after the rise of Islam, Hagarism was one of those rare books that changed a field.
Stephen Humphreys, professor atUCSB, wrote in his analytic review of thehistoriography of early Islam:[3]
Unsurprisingly, the Crone-Cook interpretation has failed to win general acceptance among Western Orientalists, let alone Muslim scholars. However, their approach does squarely confront the disparities between early Arabic tradition on the Conquest period and the accounts given by Eastern Christian and Jewish sources. The rhetoric of these authors may be an obstacle for many readers, for their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies. More substantively, their use (or abuse) of the Greek and Syriac sources has been sharply criticized. In the end, perhaps we ought to use Hagarism more as a 'what-if' exercise than as a research monograph, but it should not be ignored.
— Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry
David Waines, professor atLancaster University, states:[2]
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 relations were as intimate as they would wish them to have been. ... The book, nevertheless, has raised serious and legitimate questions by emphasizing the difficulty in employing the Muslim sources for a reconstruction of Islamic origins.
— An Introduction to Islam
The journalistToby Lester commented inThe Atlantic thatHagarism was a notorious work, and that when it was published it "came under immediate attack, from Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike, for its heavy reliance on hostile sources." He added that, "Crone and Cook have since backed away from some of its most radical propositions—such as, for example, that Muhammad lived two years longer than the Muslim tradition claims he did, and that the historicity of his migration to Medina is questionable."[14]
According to Liaquat Ali Khan who claimed to have interviewedPatricia Crone andMichael Cook, both of them would have later suggested that the central thesis of the book was mistaken because the evidence they had to support the thesis was not sufficient or internally consistent enough. Patricia Crone would have suggested to him that the book was “a graduate essay" and "a hypothesis," not "a conclusive finding", but they did nothing to acknowledge it publicly. Khan wrote 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."[15]
John Wansbrough, who had mentored the authors, reviewed the book, specifically the first part. He begins by praising the book claiming, "the authors' erudition is extraordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient." But, he says that "most, if not all, [of the sources] 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."[16]
Robert Bertram Serjeant wrote thatHagarism is "not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a 'leg pull', pure 'spoof'."[17]
Eric Manheimer commented that, "The research on Hagarism is thorough, but this reviewer feels that the conclusions drawn lack balance. The weights on the scales tip too easily toward the hypercritical side, tending to distract from what might have been an excellent study in comparative religion."[18]
Oleg Grabar describedHagarism as a "brilliant, fascinating, original, arrogant, highly debatable book" and 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" but also praised the authors for trying to "relate the Muslim phenomenon to broad theories of acculturation and historical change."[19] The classicistNorman O. Brown wrote inApocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991) thatHagarism, "illustrates in an ominous way the politics of Orientalism", and citing Grabar's review, added that, "The Western tradition of urbane condescension has degenerated into aggressive, unscrupulous even, calumny".[20]
Michael G. Morony remarked that "Despite a useful bibliography, this is a thin piece ofKulturgeschichte 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."[21]
Fred Donner, reviewingHagarism in 2006, viewed the book as a "wake-up call": despite initial repudiation, it set a milestone by pointing out that scholars need to "consider a much more varied body of source material than most were used to using, or trained to use." On the other hand, he criticized the book's indiscriminate use of non-Muslim sources and the "labyrinthine" arguments incomprehensible even to many who had strong specialist training.[22]
Robert G. Hoyland characterizedHagarism as evolving into a wider inter-disciplinary and literary approach, and said that additional studies would be published in theStudies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (SLAEI Series) in which his book appears. Since then the "SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies"[23] has also published a selection of authors who are continuing to produce work related to a modified form of this theory.
The reconstructable past as presented in Hagarism relies only on sources outside of Islâm, and constructs a view of a past so as odds with conventional views that it has been almost universally rejected. This has been particularly so because the authors' criticisms of the possibilities of understanding the earliest periods of Islâm would seem, if applied as a general method to the sources used by historians of religion, to lead toward a kind of historical solipsism.
Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others.We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things, Ms. Crone said.But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does.
There are, it must be admitted, some considerable and undeniable flaws in Hagarism's reinterpretation of formative Islam, as even its most sympathetic readers have often acknowledged. Most significantly, Hagarism has been rightly criticized for its occasionally uncritical use of non-Islamic sources in reconstructing the origins of Islam. [...] The imperfections of Hagarism should not lead us to discount completely the important insights that both this study and its approach have to offer. While some scholars have somewhat unfairly dismissed Hagarism and its approach as either hopelessly colonialist or methodologically flawed, there is still much to gain from this seminal book.
This controversial thesis did not win wide acceptance, but it did gain respect for [Crone's] erudition and lucid analysis.