The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) [Hardcover]

G. R. Hawting (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521651654 | ISBN-13: 978-0521651653 | Publication Date: January 28, 2000 0

Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? Traditional scholarship maintains that Islam developed in opposition to the idolatrous and polytheistic religion of the Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding regions. In this study of pre-Islamic Arabian religion, G. R. Hawting adopts a comparative religious perspective to suggest an alternative view. By examining the various bodies of evidence which survive from this period, the Koran and the vast resources of the Islamic tradition, the author argues that in fact Islam arose out of conflict with other monotheists whose beliefs and practices were judged to fall short of true monotheism and were, in consequence, attacked polemically as idolatry. The author is adept at unravelling the complexities of the source material, and students and scholars will find his argument both engaging and persuasive.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hawting has accomplished his task with deep learning and with sharp, detailed arguments. All students of Arabia and early Islam will do well to read this book." Meas Bulletin

"The book is original and challenging and should be read by all scholars interested in the Quran, Islamic origins, and how religions imagine their origins." Religious Studies Review

Book Description

Hawting challenges the traditional view that Islam developed in opposition to idolatry in pre-Islamic Arabia arguing that Islam arose in opposition to other forms of monotheism. The author is adept at unravelling the complexities of his material, and readers will find the argument engaging and persuasive.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 188 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521651654
• ISBN-13: 978-0521651653
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,063,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In The Fog of History!, August 9, 2005

By 

D. Riley "Written-vs-Spoken" (San Francisco, Ca, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) (Hardcover)

G. R. Hawting. The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvii + 168 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-65165-4.
Reviewed by: Walid A. Saleh

This monograph "questions how far Islam arose in arguments with real polytheists and idolaters, and suggests that it was concerned rather with other monotheists whose monotheism it saw as inadequate and attacked polemically as the equivalent of idolatry" (p. xiii). To prove this thesis, the book "questions the commonly accepted view that the opponents attacked in the Koran as idolaters and polytheists (and frequently designated there by a variety of words and phrases connected with the Arabic word shirk) were idolaters and polytheists in a literal sense" (p. 1). The theoretical position the author adopts, accordingly, treats the "image of the jahiliyya contained in the traditional literature primarily as a reflexion of the understanding of Islam's origins which developed among Muslims during the early stages of the emergence of the new form of monotheism" (p. 3). The Arabic word jahiliyya is the term given by the Qur'an and the tradition to the pre-Islamic era. This traditional material, according to the author, comprises everything produced by the emerging culture apart from the Qur'an itself and the documents stemming from the early period such as inscriptions, papyri, and coins (p. 7, n. 13). The Qur'an, according to the author, neither reflects an Arabian background nor was it produced in inner Arabia as the tradition claims. The author argues that "the polemic of the Koran against the mushrikun reflects disputes among monotheists rather than pagans and that Muslim tradition does not display much substantial knowledge of Arab pagan religion. There is no compelling reason to situate either the polemic or the tradition within Arabia" (p. 16).

The issue raised by this monograph thus can only exist, as a historical issue, if there is a marked difference between the Qur'an and what the author parenthetically calls "Muslim traditional literature." This is precisely the author's position, and he posits that a historical gap existed between the formation of the Qur'an and the appearance of this Muslim traditional literature (pp. 17-18). The Qur'an, according to the author, predates all the other literature. Moreover, the knowledge hitherto accepted as historical that we have about the rise of early Islam is not, according to the author, a product of the Qur'an but of this literature (which he defines as comprising everything but the Qur'an). The whole of the monograph is dedicated to proving that the Qur'an is not arguing against "real" pagans when it argues with the group it calls mushrikun, those who practice shirk or associationism, that is, worshiping other deities in addition to Allah. Rather, the author claims, the Qur'an is adopting a rhetorical stratagem that is very common to monotheistic traditions. To call someone a "pagan" or "idolater" was to label them as less Christian or less Jewish than the accusing faction. The same should be held true for the arguments in the Qur'an.

Hawting squarely places his work in the scholarly tradition of John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1979), but this claim of methodological affinity with Wansbrough's method undermines the author's entire effort in this monograph (pp. 16-17). For in a Wansbroughian paradigm the problem raised by Hawting is not a problem. The prime thrust of Wansbrough's approach, as far as one can summarize it, is that the whole edifice of what we now call Islam is the product of a long historical development that included the formation of the Qur'an. The Qur'an, according to Wansbrough, is thus part of the parenthetical literature that Hawting sets apart from the Qur'an. Wansbrough not only claimed that the canonization of the quranic material took place over three centuries, during which the material that comprised the Qur'an was developing and changing, but above all Wansbrough argued that the Quranic material was polemically formed in opposition to other sectarian groups, namely the Rabbinic Judaism of Iraq. Thus it is inconceivable that the main thrust of the Islamic tradition, which according to both Wansbrough and Hawting was meant to create an Arabian background for the religion, had failed to leave any trace of such a claim in the Qur'an.

Hawting is claiming that the Qur'an was the only document that somehow mysteriously escaped the Wansbroughian paradigm, a paradigm that Hawting declares nevertheless to be the key to understanding Islam, and we are not told why this is so. Thus it is not clear how and to what degree Hawting's method purports to be a continuation or a refinement of Wansbrough's method. To treat the Qur'an apart from the tradition is to undo Wansbrough's fundamental methodological axiom. Hawting's own account of how his method both follows and diverges from Wansbrough's is untenable. One cannot follow "Wansbrough's general approach, and not necessarily his tentative suggestions about absolute or relative chronology," as Hawting states, without fundamentally shifting the whole paradigm (p. 17). It is precisely the chronological implications of Wansbrough's method that are the heart of the matter. For if the Qur'an's canonization (and thus stabilization) was a belated event contemporaneous with other Muslim literature, why did the tradition not see to it that the Qur'an also reflected what was to become the fundamental claim of the new religion? To separate the Qur'an from the other Muslim traditional literature is to fall back on the method of the German school of quranic studies, from which Hawting is so adamant in differentiating himself. One cannot both invoke Wansbrough and work within the parameters of the German school. We have thus no minor methodological problem here but a major flaw that vitiates the entire work. To a Wansbroughian the issue could not be simpler: the Qur'an has material that claims to reflect an Arabian pagan past because the tradition wanted to create such an image of this past. The material in the Qur'an is thus ahistorical in so far as it does not reflect anything historical about seventh-century Arabia, but historical in so far as it reflects what Muslims wanted to project about their new religion and its origins.

A Wansbroughian would consider the presence of "pagan" material in the Qur'an, like the names of the three Goddesses, as an indication that the tradition was trying to create the illusion that Muhammad was an Arabian prophet who ministered to a pagan crowd. Thus whole passages which speak of idols, shrines and rituals of paganism--and there are many of those in the Qur'an (see Hawting's admission of this p. 50)--are there to create such an illusion. To the degree that other Muslim traditional literature, according to Hawting, was attempting to create such an illusion and to the degree that arguably they are there to create such an illusion, why should we believe the Qur'an is uniquely different on this score? We cannot have the two kinds of pagan material in the Islamic literature that Hawting posits: one that is patently false because it is historically untrue (the material in what Hawting called "Muslim tradition literature" which purports to reflect the original setting of the rise of Islam in inner Arabia) and another that is polemically false, yet historically true (the material in the Qur'an which uses pagan imagery but only does so polemically, according to Hawting, and can only be referring to a monotheistic environment and is thus referring to actual historical polemic with other "monotheists"). The conclusion seems inescapable that, like the reports about the life of Muhammad (what is called the Sira), the Qur'an was also trying to create this image of an Arabian background.

Thus to review the rest of the work is to suspend judgment on it. Even if, however, we accept the author's assertions that the Qur'an is above and beyond the tradition (forgetting the supposed affinity with Wansbrough and thus overlooking the theoretical conundrum at the heart of the work) and if we follow the book's argument, we will also find that most of its conclusions are based on the slimmest of evidence, a fact that the author himself is willing to concede. Not only does the main supporting beam of the book, namely its affinity with Wansbrough's method, prove to be absent on closer inspection, but most of the evidence the author supplies to prove his thesis in fact runs counter to it.

I will give here some examples of the author's method. Chapters 2 and 3 of the book attempt to show that nothing in the Qur'an refers to "real polytheism." Much of the author's argument rests on analyzing the word shirk and its cognates in the Qur'an; he attempts to show that these words mean something different from what we have so far supposed they mean. The argument depends on whether Arabic shirk could be proven to refer to polytheists or not. If inscriptions earlier than seventh-century Islam used the word to refer to polytheists, then the Qur'an is most probably referring to "real polytheists." As it happens there is such an inscription, which comes from a Sabaean inscription available at the British Museum. The author has to grapple with this inscription and two others which clearly use the root "sh-r-k." Yet the author attempts to mitigate the implication for his theory of such inscriptions by casting doubt on it in a footnote that states, "in conversation Dr. Arthur Irvine remarked to me that he thought there had been questions about the reading of the text" (p. 70, n. 6). This is a most troubling way of dismissing published works, i.e. hearsay! The author lives and teaches in London, and... Read more ›

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Generally Tendentious, November 19, 2003

By 

Tron Honto - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) (Hardcover)

Though a relatively short work, Hawtings work is an interesting attemtpt to tease out what can be considered historical among the Muslim tradition concerning religion in the pre-Islamic period.
Nonetheless, this work is one that is fraught with problems. Most of this revolves around the treatment of the term "mushrikoun" throughout the Qur'an insofar as Hawting undertakes a great deal of equivocation of the term. Insofar as the bulk of his books locates the impetus behind the chronicling of pre-Islamic Arabian cults with an unlikely narrow interpretation of 'mushrikoun' which he credits Muslim scholarship with imposing on the Quran--wrongly in I believe being that 'mushrikoun' was a term widely applied to anyone other than a Muslim both in the Koran and early Muslim works contrary to Hawtings claim--his scenario remains tendentious, unconvincing and speculative.
Despite this deep flaw, the treatment of the material is fascinating and engaging as a whole--redeeming much of the books' flaws.