Customer Reviews

Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity

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It is a pity this book is out of print, because no other work so clearly describes the challenges facing the early Caliphs (Khalifa) as they were compelled to turn their divinely inspired kingdom into a very earthly empire with something approaching a regular army. The early Islamic conquests were made by the entire mass of (male) believers, organized on tribal lines, responding to the call of the Khalifa...but such a force was unreliable and as likely to kill the Caliph as defend him.. Crone analyzes the alternatives pursued as the Caliphs moved from being successors to the Prophet to Kings in their own right. Brilliantly done-

Dr. Crone has acquired more knowledge than any human being should rightfully possess, and this becomes immediately apparent when one reads her book. Although Slaves on Horses is a 'scholarly' work, it is nevertheless accessible to any lay reader interested in early Islam. Her writing is smooth, succinct, and even passionate. My only grievance is that the work is rather short; appendices and endnotes take up nearly two thirds of the book. I sometimes wish she had elaborated on some of her more controversial statements within the text itself, rather than burying her justifications in the endnotes. Nonetheless, Slaves On Horses is still an exceptional book and well worth the read.

Islam's relying on Slave soldiers to protect and defend its empire was the root of its decline. The slave soldier neither has the interest or the caring to defend his homeland, rather like a mercenary he fights for his life and runs away at the earliest possible moment when all seems lost. This book develops the scholarship on Islam's early use of slave soldiers, making the arguemtn that the weakness and distrust of the early Islamic rulers led them to adopt slaves, who had no kin, no tribe, and therefore would be apolitical. The fact that all four of the first Caliphs were assasinated certainly helped this idea on its way. The second major factor in choosing slaves is that the Bedouin soldiers and raiders who propelled Islam out of Arabia were not reliable soldiers and could not wage set piece battles, all though this military fact is overlooked this is a good study and goes half way to explaining the failure of Islamic Jihadist armies at Lepanto and Poiters.

Seth J. Frantzman

Patricia Crone wrote this in 1980, after some controversial (and since abandoned) earlier starts. It is the first work of hers which I can recommend.

Her earlier work relied on "Islam as others saw it", to borrow a phrase. This work assumes the barest skeleton of the "Hagarism" narrative, and fleshes out that skeleton from the historical Muslim accounts mainly from hadith and administrative records. The book seeks to explain how and why the Caliphate ended up reliant upon "slaves on horses" to defend it. After all, the phrase "slaves on horses" is a phrase of horror in Jewish and Christian literature; and Islamic apocalyptic complains about it too.

As such this is best termed a military and caste history, from the 650s on. Crone finds the evolution of the Caliphal armies to be explicable by practical concerns, not religious. As a result she has little of Islam-as-religion in here, excepting the propaganda from this or that rebel.

It is less a "book" than a 92-page monograph, with extensive appendices. The appendices are the important part: they tell you who was stationed where and when, and of what family and tribe... in Syria and Iraq. (Egypt and North Africa and Spain do not feature.) These appendices are still of value for those who are fact-checking hadiths of the Fertile Crescent. They are in this book to show how Sufyani administration differed from Marwani administration which, in turn, differed from `Abbasi administration.

The writing style is breathless and endnote-reliant - typical of Crone's earlier work - and you can be lulled into reading quickly past many pages before realising that you have not followed the argument. The book's argument is, however, solid; you just have to work harder at it to absorb it. The book has held up over time; I have not found in the literature debunkings on the scale as, say, Crone's OWN debunking of her "Meccan Trade" in "Quraysh and the Roman Army".