Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a controversial book on the early history of Islam authored by historians
Patricia Crone and
Michael Cook with contributions from a number of notable historiographers of Islam such as
G. R. Hawting and
Bernard Lewis.
In Hagarism the authors make an examination of the
archeological ,
Arabic,
Armenian ,
Coptic,
Greek ,
Hebrew,
Aramaic,
Latin and
Syriac records of the early 7th century and present their conclusions drawn from corresponding primary sources to present an account of early Islam at odds with the traditionally accepted version based off Muslim historical accounts.
According to the authors, the historical documents presented in the book suggest that the
Arab conquests and the formation of the
caliphate was a peninsular Arab movement inspired by
Jewish messianism, who in alliance with
Jews attempted to reclaim the
Promised Land from the
Byzantines. The authors present documentation to support their thesis that the
Qur'an was the product of 8th century edits of various material taken from a multitude of
Judeo-Christian and
Middle-Eastern sources, and that
Muhammad was the herald of
Umar "the redeemer"; a messiah.
According to the authors Hagarism was a heretical branch of Judaism followed by the
Hagarenes or
Arabs in the early part of the 7th century. To the authors, the surviving records of the period describe the followers of
Muhammad as
hagarenes, because of the way Muhammad invoked the Jewish god in order to introduce an alien
monotheistic faith to the
Arabs. He is reported as doing this by claiming biological descent from
Abraham through his slave wife
Hagar for the Arabs in the same way as the Jews who claimed descent from Abraham through
Sarah and thus as their ancestral faith. During this early period the Jews and the Hagarenes united, into a faith the authors loosely describe as Judeo-Hagarism, in order to recover the
holy land from the
Christian Byzantines. In their analysis, the early manuscripts from eye witnesses suggest that Muhammad was the leader of a military expedition to conquer Jerusalem, and that the original
Hijra actually referred to a journey from northern Arabia to that city. The authors then contend that the Hagarenes splintered off from the Jews, and went on to devise a version of Abrahamic monotheism, that evolved from a blend of
Judaism,
Samaritanism and
Christianity, into what is now Islam. They propose that Islam was thus born and fashioned from Judaic mythology and symbology, that is; the creation of a sacred scripture similar to the Jewish
Torah - (the
Qur'an), and a
Moses like prophet; along with a sacred city of (Medina) modeled on the Jewish holy city adjacent to a holy mountain .
Hagarism begins with the premise that
Western historical scholarship on the beginnings of
Islam should only be based on historical,
archeological and
philological data rather than Islamic traditions which they find to be dogmatically-based, historically irreconcilable and
anachronistic accounts of the community's past of no historic value. Thus, relying exclusively on historical, archeological and
philological evidence the authors attempt to reconstruct and present what they argue is a more historically accurate account of Islam's origins and are summed up as:
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.
[ P Crone & M Cook, Hagarism: The Making Of The Islamic World, 1977, Cambridge University Press, pg. 3]While the full assertions of the book were controversial, the attempts to deconstruct early Islamic history have made this a groundbreaking and important work on early Islamic history.
The authors document their thesis that Muhammad was preaching a heretical form of Judaism around 634 and was proclaiming the advent of a Jewish
Messiah by drawing upon early non-Muslim sources such as the
Doctrina Iacobi (AD 634) and others listed in the table below.
Criticisms
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
[van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Suppliment, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998] and criticised for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..."
[Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991) pp. 84-85] The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted.
* Eric Manheimer concluded his review with the following::"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."
[Eric I. Manheimer. "Review". The American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1. (Feb., 1978), pp. 240-241]* 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."
[ Introduction to Islam, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-42929-3, pp 273-274]*
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, [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.
[J. Wansbrough. "Review". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 41, No. 1. (1978), pp. 155-156.]* 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."
[Daniel Pipes. "Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy". The Middle East Quarterly. September 1999. Volume VI: Number 3.]* In 2006, 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
[ P Crone & M Cook, Hagarism: The Making Of The Islamic World, 1977, Cambridge University Press, pg. 8] claimed
Thesis Update
In 2006, 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
[ P Crone & M Cook, Hagarism: The Making Of The Islamic World, 1977, Cambridge University Press, pg. 8] claimed
Liaquat Ali Khan further said that
Hagarism is "another book in the large dump of attack literature" and an attack on "the Quran's authenticity, the Prophet's integrity, [and] Islamic history". He stated that he has had private correspondence with the authors and stating that Michael Cook 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."
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. Crone and Cook have not allowed any reprint of the book, and their later works tacitly abandon many of the hypotheses of
Hagarism. Even though the book is out-of-print and no longer widely available, it still features in many academic bibliographies and reading lists.
*
Historiography of early Islam*
The Historical Problem of Islamic Origins*
External References to Islam.
