Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam) [Hardcover]

David Cook (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 470 pages
• Publisher: Darwin Pr (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878501428
• ISBN-13: 978-0878501427
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Standard on Islamic Apocalyptic, August 10, 2006

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St. John of Damascus - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam) (Hardcover)

A brief review: David Cook is perhaps the premiere scholar in the world on Muslim Apocalytic literature. This tome is his magnum opus on the subject. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden and any other number of Islamic wing-nuts send out subtle or possibly more overt messages regarding their Islamic end-time fanatasies, there are many who are now scrambling to get a solid grasp as to what in the world they are talking about. This book is the book that other books on the subject cite. For those who truly wish to plunge the depths of Islamic eschatology, this is the volume to plunge into. Admittedly slightly ponderous reading, it is nonetheless the standard. An amazing accomplishment.

5.0 out of 5 stars still the best survey of Islamic apocalyptic, November 16, 2011

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David Reid Ross "zimriel" (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam) (Hardcover)

Islam holds a centrality in Muslim life in a way that Christianity does not hold in Christian life... except for "the fundamentalists". The Christian fundamentalists have a byline in apocalyptic as may be seen in the "Left Behind" series; Bruce Bawer has critiqued the tendency. But this begs the question about - where's all that pocky clips in Islam?

It turns out that there is quite a bit of pocky clips in Islam. There's some in the Qur'an but, mainly, it's in Hadith. Those who collected that Hadith only caught a tiny bit of what was out there; leaving some modern and Sunni scholars to speculate that it was mainly a Shi`ite thing. It turns out that this view is anachronistic, and reflects simply that the Shi`a preserved their books better. In Islam's first centuries, EVERYONE was into the End Of The World - "The Hour", in their own terms. Ibn Abi Shayba, `Abd al-Razzaq and especially Nu`aym b Hammad compiled whole books on the topic.

David Cook has, here, attempted to assign these hadiths to genres. I am not sure that Cook has entirely succeeded - there is overlap, and I see many points where he just quotes mediaeval encyclopaedias like the Kanz al-`Ummal instead of going back to original sources to tease out who said what and when. But when you consider that this book is just an overview, and that (as far as I know) no-one had tried this before him; you really can't take away from his achievement.

The content of apocalyptic is grim by nature, and paranoid, and involves wishes of mass destruction to enemies; it can be draining to read. Cook's writing style is subtly witty and mocking of these excesses, helping the medicine to go down.

If you are going to learn about Islamic apocalyptic from its first centuries, you need this book as a summary. If you are setting out to do a study on a specific hadith, you need this book as a starting point and an index.