Hagarism

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a book by scholars and historiographer of early Islam Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.

The book presents a study of the roots of the Islamic religion and culture in Judeo-Christian ideas, Greek philosophy, Roman law and Persian statehood.

Thesis

Hagarism begins on the premise that Western historical scholarship on Islam's beginnings should be based on the highest standards of historical and archeological and philological research rather than rely on the account of traditional Islamic mythos which has had a tendency to weave dogmatically-based historically irreconcilable and anachronistic accounts of the community's past. Thus, relying exclusively on historical, archeological and philological evidence the authors reconstructs and present what they argue is a historically accurate and supported account of Islam's origins.

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 But equally, it makes some sense to regard the tradition as without determinate historical content, and to insist that what purport to be accounts of religious events in the seventh century are utilizable only for the study of religious ideas in the eighth.’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.

Drawing from early non-Muslim historical sources such as the Doctrina Iacobi AD 634, the authors present documents that record Muhammad preaching Judaism and proclaiming the advent of the Jewish Messiah , concluding that early Islam was a school of Messianic Judaism, whose aim was to conquer the Holy Land from the Byzantines with an army composed of Jews and Arabs. Early manuscripts suggest that Muhammad was the leader of a military expedition to conquer Jerusalem, and that the original Hijra actually referred to the journey from northern Arabia to that city.

The term 'hagarism' refers to the way Muhammad justified the inclusion of the Arabs by emphasizing the common ancestry of the Jews and Arabs from Abraham, through Sarah for the Jews and Hagar for the Arabs. Eventually the Arabs splintered off from the Jews, and Hagarism continued to develop into what is now Islam: a blend of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity. In this light the mythology of Islam was born with the creation a century later of a holy text modelled on the Jewish Torah - (the Qur’an), and the fashioning a prophet like status for Muhammad based on Moses and the assigning of a sacred city (Medina) again modelled on the Jewis holy city adjacent to a holy mountain .

Reception

John Wansbrough, professor of 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 claming, "the authors; erudition is extrapordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient". He concludes that their research, while good, was used by their methodology to make too gradiose an assumption:

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.

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."

Eric Manheimer in The American Historical Review said he found the research to be thorough even if some terminology was confusing and concluded that "the conclusions drawn lack balance". The review was by no means all negative. He complimented their scrutiny of the source and agrees that most Islamic scholars believe that Islam borrowed from Jewish, Christian, and other traditions.

While the full assertions of the book were not widely accepted, the attempts to deconstruct early Islamic history make this a groundbreaking and important work in early Islamic history.

Quote from the book

• 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.

Apparent Repudiation

Michael Cook and Patricia Crone, no longer subscribe to the findings of this work. In a phone interview with Dr. Liaquat Ali Khan, Michael Cook says, "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." Patricia Crone's statements seem to corroborate with that of Cook's: "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."

See also

• Historiography of early Islam