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Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World

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As the other reviews to this book seem to have been written by reviewers with an axe to grind, I thought that I would say a few words about this short book. The first important thing to understand is that while Cook and Crone, both reputable scholars, put forth a carefully argued thesis here, their view is very much the minority view among non-Muslim scholars of Islam. The controversial element: while Muhammad was likely a real person, an migrant who founded a movement around 622, most other elements of early Islamic tradition, including the revelation of the Quran and the central role of Mecca, are likely invented traditions fabricated in the latter part of the seventh century.

While it is difficult to imagine that Islam as we think of it was invented after the conquests (circa 633-650), the Cook/Crone thesis is not without hard evidence. For example, coins with Quranic verses differ from the official version sixty years after it was supposedly standardized by Uthman. Some early non-Muslim sources - of very limited quantity - do seem to support a radically different story than the standard one. The fact that the tradition was not written down until well over a century after the fact certainly calls it into question if it is contradicted by other evidence, however sketchy.

One element of the thesis I find interesting is the argument that the break between Muslims and Jews took place not in the late 620s, as Muslim tradition claims, but after the conquest of Palestine. Only then, so the argument goes, was the focus of Islam reoriented toward Mecca from Palestine. I find this interesting because it would throw a great deal of light onto how exactly the Muslims managed their amazing conquests with so much apparent ease. That Christians and Jews in Palestine and Syria were unhappy with Byzantium is widely known, but this thesis adds much to that point.

The historic interpretation of the Koran is, for political reasons, still in its infacy. This book is a valuable first step.

When the "Christoph Luxenberg" book is translated into English this year (2004), it will stimulate more interest.

For a good overview of the issues presented, go to Atlantic Monthly (on-line), Jan 1999, and check out the article by Toby Lester "What is the Koran?"

Contrary to most modern so called scholarly analyses of Islam, which are apologetic, Hagarism exposes some of its falsehoods and is very helpfull for anyone who wants to research about the subject without self imposed dhimmi attitude of fear and adjustment to the current Muslim ideology.

Briefly, the authors put aside the Muslim sources in their entirety as unreliable. The void is then filled by the earliest non-Muslim references to Islam. In the authors view, the non-Muslim sources can be trusted in their entirety, which are then used to reconstruct Islamic origins roughly as follows:

Islam developed from a messianic sect of "Hagarenes." Muhammad united the Arabs around the concept of One God and preached that being the descendants of Abraham, the Arabs were the rightful heirs of Palestine. The members of this sect were called "muhajirun." The "hijrah" was not from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) but from Arabia to the "Promised Land," in which Jews participated. Muhammad was alive when the movement's messianic figure, Umar, entered Jerusalem in 638.

The Jews welcomed the new invaders, though the Christians deemed them barbarians. After a while there was a break-up between the Arabs and the Jews, the former asserting its distinct identity by emphasising that theirs was the true religion of Abraham. The Arabs accepted Jesus as Messiah but denied his death and Davidic decent for hating the cross.

Muhammad was first aligned with a number of non-Biblical prophets, then to a "prophet like Moses," recipient of a new revealed book. This is when the Quran was hurriedly composed as Muhammad's scripture, probably at the end of the 7th century. The notion of the hijrah was replaced with that of "Islam" and the believers came to be known as "Muslims."

The Arabs began looking for a new holy city, while still controlling Jerusalem. They needed a sanctuary associated with the grave of Ishmael. Eventually, in Abdul Malik's time, they located one in Mecca. Thereafter, Muhammad's links with Jerusalem were severed and the date of his death was adjusted to a period prior to the conquest and the hijrah was transformed into an emigration from Mecca to Yathrib.

The above is the gist of Hagarism. In New Testament studies, the Hagarism enterprise would be similar to rejecting the entire New Testament w(and all Christian sources), replacing them with the few existing non-Christian fragments, which are uncritically/creatively used to revise history.

But there is no reason to suppose that the non-Muslim authors were any better informed on Islam, or more "balanced" than Muslims, particularly when they were probably unfamiliar with the Arabic language, having no first hand knowledge of Arabia or even an interest in Islamic history. Why should we expect non-Muslims to have possessed detailed accurate knowledge on Islam at this very early stage? As late as the Crusades many Christians believed that Muslims worshipped idols and Muhammad!

The authors are "critical" - hyper-sceptical - only in dismissing Muslim sources. At work is a strong prejudice which causes them to reject all Muslim sources in toto since Muslims cannot be trusted. Hagarism has been rightly dismissed and harshly critiqued in the scholarly circles over the years.

Defending Hagarism, someone said that some early non-Muslim sources appear to present a "radically different" story from the standard one. It should be noted that Crone's student, Hoyland ("Seeing Islam as Others Saw It"), has published an exhaustive survey of the earliest non-Muslim references to Islam. He concludes, in sharp contrast to Crone/Cook, that these sources CONFIRM rather than call into question the traditional Islamic accounts.

It was also said that Hagarism is based on some "hard evidence," not withstanding its almost universal rejection. The hardness of the evidence can be gauged from the fact that the authors no longer endorse Hagarism. Unfortunately, many unfamiliar with scholarship, such as the openly hostile anti-Muslim reviews below, are quick to promote Hagarism without realizing that the authors themselves have dismissed its revisionist claims.

Khan reports: "However, what distinguishes this book is the fact that its authors ... no longer subscribe to its critical findings ..."

About Crone: "She [Crone] was even more candid in repudiating the central thesis of the book. She agrees with the critics that the book was "a graduate essay." The book was published in 1977 when the authors lived in England. "We were young, and we did not know anything. The book was just a hypothesis, not a conclusive finding," said Crone. "I do no think that the book's thesis is valid."" [...]

Crone recently acknowledged we know more about Muhammad than about Jesus and that: "...we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that he [Muhammad] made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God. The book may not preserve all the messages he claimed to have received, and he is not responsible for the arrangement in which we have them. They were collected after his death - how long after is controversial. But that he uttered all or most of them is difficult to doubt."
[...]

It was also said that coins with Quranic verses "differ" from the accepted Quranic text. But as Whelan and Hoyland pointed out, these are secondary changes - introduced to fit the sense. The accepted standard text is deliberately adapted in minor ways to emphasis particular themes, a common Muslim practise. Whelan says, "...even inscriptions of much later dates, when there is no question that a "canonical" text of the Qur'an had been established, embody such variations." ("Forgotten Witnesses")

Recent archaeological discoveries have AFFIRMED rather than called into question the traditional Islamic accounts. Neuwirth acknowledges:

"As a whole, however, the theories of the so-called sceptic or revisionist scholars ... have by now been discarded ... New findings of qur'anic fragments, moreover, can be adduced to affirm rather than call into question the traditional picture of the Qur'an as an early fixed text composed of the suras we have. Nor have scholars trying to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments succeeded in seriously discrediting the genuiness of the Qur'an as we know it ... "

"Structural, linguistic and literary features," in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an, pp. 100-101

I recommend Hagarism, but only so that readers know how not to be bad "historians."

This wodnerful text explores the truth behind the founding of Islam and sheds light on the scholarship of the Koran showing that in fact much of what we are taught is not neccesariyl correct regarding islamic history. A very essential text in understadning the history of Islam and its founding.

Seth J. Frantzman

The religious texts of monotheistic religions form an intersecting field of study. For a starter, the historicity of the Christian bibles is so much in doubt hence it leads to legitimate questions about the exact dates and the identity of the authors. And the fact that all the "prophetic" books of the old testament were shamelessly written long after the events they claim to "predict" have happened, is all but too obvious except for the utterly ignorant.

The Koran itself may be open to scrutiny, about its authorship, the language it uses and many other aspects.

The two authors "Crone & Cook" have simply done nothing except parroting the questions that real scholars have had about the historicity of biblical texts and tried raising the same questions about Islamic history, without the slightest modification that is warranted due to the totally different historical backgrounds. For that reason they had to ignore all existing scholarship and to exclude all historical evidence except what they determined valid if it served their thesis. In most cases even this selectiveness in choosing the sources is not enough, they have to twist the meaning, use their own interpolation of the narrative to come up with the results they seek.

For example, after quoting for almost a whole page an "Armenian Chronicle" supposedly written in the 660s and ascribed to Bishop Sebeos, which even according to the authors, and I quote :

" This version of the origins of Islam is an unfamiliar one. It is also manifestly ahistorical in its admixture of Biblical ethnography and demonstrably wrong in the role it ascribes to the Jewish refugees from Edessa. This role, quite apart from its geographical implausibility, is in effect chronologically impossible ..... This need not however invalidate the picture which Sebes gives .. " (page 7) !!!!

This quote is but one example of the level of "scholarship" that has gone into the book.

Furthermore, in the preface to the book the authors claim that the book will raise the eyebrows of the specialist, won't be accepted by a "believing Muslim", even disliked by a "Muslim who has lost his religious faith but retained his ancestral pride". Well let me add that the book is an insult to any reader with a sense or understanding of scholarship and history, after all, historical research is not a fishing expedition where we dig for flimsy and uncorroborated sources simply to try to prove pre-conceived ideas and hypotheses.

Their hypothisis would be nothing short of laughable if it were not for the fake mantle of "scholarship" that the authors cloak themselves with. Furthermore, it is appalling if "Hagarism" reflects the level of "scholarship" in this field, since at best, the book does not move past the polemics of the religious fanatics of the middle ages.