Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World is a 1977 book about the early history of Islam by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.[1] Drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac, 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 an Arab movement of the 7th century CE whose conquests and resultant caliphate were inspired by Jewish messianism. Crone and Cook contend that an alliance of Arabs and Jews sought to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantine Empire, that the Qur'an consists of 8th-century edits of various Judeo-Christian and other Middle-Eastern sources, and that Muhammad was the herald of Umar "the redeemer", a Judaic messiah.[3]
The hypotheses proposed in Hagarism 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 Mediterranean late antiquity to theories of acculturation. Following earlier critical work by Goldziher, Schacht, and Wansbrough, it challenged scholars to use a much wider methodology, including techniques already used in biblical 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]
Synopsis
Cook and Crone postulate that "Hagarism" started as a "Jewish messianic movement" to "reestablish Judaism" in the Jewish Holyland (Palestine), that its adherents were first known as muhajirun (migrants) rather than Muslims, and that their hijra (migration) was to Jerusalem rather than Medina. Its members were initially both Jewish and Arab but the Arabs' increasing success impelled them to break from the Jews around the time of Abd 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 independent Abrahamic monotheist identity. This borrowed key concepts from the Jewish breakaway sect of Samaritanism: "the idea of a scripture limited to the Pentateuch, a prophet like Moses (Muhammad), a holy book revealed like the Torah (the Quran), a sacred city (Mecca) with a nearby mountain (Jabal an-Nour) and shrine (the Kaaba) of an appropriate patriarch (Abraham), plus a caliphate modeled on an Aaronid priesthood."[11]
Methodology
Hagarism begins with the premise that Western historical scholarship on the beginnings of Islam should be based on contemporary historical, archaeological and philological 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 and anachronistic accounts of the community's past. By relying on contemporary historical, archaeological and philological 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.
The term Hagarism
According to the authors, Hagarenes is a term used commonly by various sources (Greek Magaritai, Syriac Mahgre or Mahgraye) 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 of muhājirūn, an Arabic term for those who partake in hijra (exodus). Secondly, it refers to Ishmaelites: descendants of Abraham through his handmaid Hagar and their child Ishmael, in the same way as the Jews claimed descent and their ancestral faith from Abraham through his wife Sarah and their child Isaac. Muhammad would have claimed such descent for Arabs to give them a birthright to the Holy Land and to prepend a monotheist genealogy compatible with Judaism to their pagan ancestral practice (such as sacrifice and circumcision). Hagarism thus refers to this early faith movement. The designation as Muslims and Islam would only come later, after the success of conquests made the duty of hijra obsolete.(pp.8-9)
Origins
The authors, interpreting 7th century Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew sources, put forward the hypothesis that Muhammad was alive during the conquest of Palestine (about two years longer than traditionally believed; the caliphate of Abu 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 the Promised Land from the ChristianByzantines. This redeemer came in the person of Umar, as suggested by the Aramaic origins of his epithet Al-Faruq (i.e. "the distinguisher [between right and wrong]").
The hijra, 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 the Arab 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.
Development
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 (though rejecting 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 the Samaritan scriptural position, defined as accepting the Pentateuch 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 in Shechem and a temple on the nearby Mount Gerizim; Mecca with its nearby mountain were contrived as a parallel of these.
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 of mahdism, 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.
Consolidation in Iraq
The transition to a confident, recognisably Islamic identity, with its various borrowings assimilated, occurred in the late 7th century, during the reign of Abd al-Malik. However, its evolution continued. As power was transferred from Syria to Iraq, Islam incorporated the rabbinical culture of Babylonian Judaism: religious law practised by a learned laity and based on oral traditions.
In the second half of the eighth century, the early Muʿtazila, simultaneously with Karaite Judaism, rejected all oral traditions, leading to a failed attempt to base law on Greek rationalism. In response, scholars followed Shafi'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 the Abbasid Revolution; Umar had already lived and there was no lost land or freedom to hope for. This led Sunni religious politics into quietism under a desanctified state, contrasted only with "Sufi resignation".
Wider context
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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]
Reception
The thesis of Hagarism is not accepted.[9] Crone and Cook's work was part of revisionist history[13] arising from several scholars associated with the University of London's School 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 by Josef 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 at Princeton, 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 in Hagarism is an accurate one. But the legacy of Hagarism 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.
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.
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 journalist Toby Lester commented in The Atlantic that Hagarism 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 interviewed Patricia Crone and Michael 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]
Scholarly reviews
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 that Hagarism 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 described Hagarism 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 classicist Norman O. Brown wrote in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991) that Hagarism, "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 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."[21]
Fred Donner, reviewing Hagarism 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]
Follow-up work
Robert G. Hoyland characterized Hagarism as evolving into a wider inter-disciplinary and literary approach, and said that additional studies would be published in the Studies 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.
Seeing Islam As Others Saw It – a book by Robert G. Hoyland, former student of Patricia Crone, providing an extensive collection of contemporary non-Muslim sources that give accounts of the formative period of Islam.
Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya, commonly shortened to Sīrah and translated as prophetic biography, are the traditional Muslim biographies of the Islamic prophet Muhammad from which, in addition to the Quran and Hadiths, most historical information about his life and the early period of Islam is derived.
In the biblical Book of Genesis, Ishmael was the first son of Abraham. His mother was Hagar, the handmaiden of Abraham's wife Sarah. He died at the age of 137. Traditionally, he is seen as the ancestor of the Arabs.
Bakkah, is a place mentioned in surah 3, ayah 96 of the Qur'an, a verse sometimes translated as: "Indeed, the first House [of worship] established for mankind was that at Bakkah [i.e., Makkah] - blessed and a guidance for the worlds."
In Islam, the terms ḥanīf and ḥunafā' are primarily used to refer to pre-Islamic Arabians who were Abrahamic monotheists. These people are regarded in a favourable light for shunning Arabian polytheism and solely worshipping the God of Abraham, thus setting themselves apart from what is known as jahiliyyah. However, it is emphasized that they were not associated with Judaism or Christianity—and instead adhered to a unique monotheistic faith that exemplified the unaltered beliefs and morals of Abraham. The word is found twelve times in the Quran: ten times in the singular form and twice in the plural form. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad himself was a ḥanīf and a direct descendant of Abraham's eldest son Ishmael. Likewise, all Islamic prophets and messengers before Muhammad—that is, those affiliated with Judaism and/or Christianity, such as Moses and Jesus—are classified as ḥunafā' to underscore their God-given infallibility.
The historiography of early Islam is the secular scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first purported revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.
The Ishmaelites were a collection of various Arab tribes, tribal confederations and small kingdoms described in Abrahamic tradition as being descended from and named after Ishmael, a prophet according to the Quran, the first son of Abraham and the Egyptian Hagar.
Urwa ibn al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam al-Asadi was an early Muslim traditionist, widely regarded as a founding figure in the field of historical study among the Muslims. He was a son of Muhammad's close aide al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, and a nephew of his wife A'isha. He spent much of his life in Medina, witnessed the First Fitna (656–661) as a youth, and supported his elder brother Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr in his failed attempt to establish his caliphate in the Second Fitna (680–692). After Abd Allah's elimination by his Syria-based Umayyad rivals, Urwa reconciled with the Umayyads, whom he paid occasional visits and maintained a literary correspondence with.
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialising in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
William Montgomery Watt was a Scottish historian and orientalist. An Anglican priest, Watt served as Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh from 1964 to 1979 and was also a prominent contributor to the field of Quranic studies.
Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State is a book by archaeologist Yehuda D. Nevo and researcher Judith Koren. The book presents a radical theory of the origins and development of the Islamic state and religion based on archeological, epigraphical and historiographical research.
Hagarenes is a term widely used by early Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Armenian sources to describe the early Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt.
The Teaching of Jacob has a controversial dating from the early 7th century to the late 8th century. It is a Greek Christian polemical tract supposedly set in Carthage in 634 but written in Syria Palaestina sometime between 634 and 640. It supposedly records a weeks-long discussion ending on July 13, 634, among Jews who have been forcibly baptized by order of the emperor. One of them, Jacob, has come to believe sincerely in Christianity; he instructs the rest about why they should also sincerely embrace their new faith. Halfway through, a Jewish merchant named Justus arrives and challenges Jacob to a debate. In the end, all of the participants are convinced to embrace Christianity, and Jacob and Justus return east. In addition to several partial Greek manuscripts, the text survives in Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic and Slavonic translations.
Michael Allan Cook FBA is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam.
The Quran is viewed to be the scriptural foundation of Islam and is believed by Muslims to have been sent down by God and revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jabreel (Gabriel). The Quran has been subject to criticism both in the sense of being the subject of an interdisciplinary field of study where secular, (mostly) Western scholars set aside doctrines of its divinity, perfection, unchangeability, etc. accepted by Muslim Islamic scholars; but also in the sense of being found fault with by those — including Christian missionaries and other skeptics hoping to convert Muslims — who argue it is not divine, not perfect, and/or not particularly morally elevated.
The Islamic prophet Muhammad's views on Jews were formed through the contact he had with Jewish tribes living in and around Medina. His views on Jews include his theological teaching of them as People of the Book, his description of them as earlier receivers of Abrahamic revelation; and the failed political alliances between the Muslim and Jewish communities.
The historicity of Muhammad refers to the study of Muhammad as a historical figure and critical examination of sources upon which traditional accounts are based.
Hājar, known as Hagar in the Hebrew Bible, was the wife of the patriarch and Islamic prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and the mother of Ismā'īl (Ishmael). She is a revered woman in the Islamic faith. According to Muslim belief, she was a maid of the king of Egypt who gifted her to Ibrahim's wife Sarah. Although not mentioned by name in the Qur'an, she is referenced and alluded to via the story of her husband. She eventually settled in the Desert of Paran, seen as the Hejaz in the Islamic view, with her son Ishmael. Hajar is honoured as an especially important matriarch of monotheism, as Ishmael was the ancestor of Muhammad.
Ishmael is regarded by Muslims as an Islamic prophet. Born to Abraham and Hagar, he is the namesake of the Ishmaelites, who were descended from him. In Islam, he is associated with Mecca and the construction of the Kaaba within today's Masjid al-Haram, which is the holiest Islamic site. Muslims also consider him to be a direct ancestor to Muhammad. His paternal half-brother was Isaac, the forefather of the Israelites.
The revisionist school of Islamic studies is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.
Quranic studies is the academic application of a diverse set of disciplines to study the Quran, drawing on methods including but not limited to ancient history, philology, textual criticism, lexicography, codicology, literary criticism, comparative religion, and historical criticism.
References
↑ Crone, Patricia; Cook, Michael (1977). Hagarism; The Making Of The Islamic World. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN0-521-21133-6.
↑ Gordon Newby (1988). A History of the Jews of Arabia. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. p.110. 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.
↑ Stille, Alexander (2 March 2002). "Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran". The New York Times. Retrieved August 22, 2012. 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.
↑ Shoemaker, Stephen J. (2011-11-29). The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam. University of Pennsylvania. pp.1–2. doi:10.9783/9780812205138. ISBN978-0-8122-0513-8. 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.
1 2 Sadowski, Yahya (1997). "The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate". In Beinin, Joel; Stork, Joe (eds.). Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. University of California Press. p.47. doi:10.1525/9780520917583. ISBN978-0-520-91758-3. This controversial thesis did not win wide acceptance, but it did gain respect for [Crone's] erudition and lucid analysis.
1 2 3 van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Supplement, 8 September 1978, p. 998
↑ (SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies). Albany, NY, U.S.A.: State University of New York Press
Further reading
Coster, Marije, "Hagarism", in Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God (2 vols.), Edited by C. Fitzpatrick and A. Walker, Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2014, Vol I, pp.236–239.
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