Patricia Crone

Patricia Crone
Born	1945
Academic work
Main interests	Islamic Studies; Quranic (Islamic) studies; scriptural exegesis; scholarship on Islamic origins
Notable works	Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (with M.A. Cook); Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam

Patricia Crone, born 1945 in Denmark, is a scholar, author, Orientalist, and historian of early Islamic history working since 1997 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is notable as an historian of Islam, who has relied on treating the Koran as scripture with a history, just as there are histories of the Bible. She also draws from the work of linguists and archeologists.

Career

Patricia Crone completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of London, receiving a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1973 under Bernard Lewis. For the next three years, she served as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Warburg Institute.

In 1977, Crone became a University Lecturer in Islamic history and a Fellow of Jesus College at Oxford University. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University in 1990. She has held several positions at Cambridge since then. She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992 to 1994, and Reader in Islamic history from 1994 until 1997.

That year, 1997, she was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she became Andrew W. Mellon professor. Since 2002, she has been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Social Evolution & History.

In their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Crone and her associate Michael Cook, working at SOAS at the time, provided a new analysis of early Islamic history by studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, which were written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses. By using non-Arabic sources, they could study more of the context for the rise of Islam. They argued that Islam, as represented by contemporary, non-Muslim sources, was in essence a tribal rebellion against incursions by the Byzantine and Persian empires. They noted that it had deep roots in Judaism, and that Arabs and Jews were allies in these conquering communities.

In her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), Crone argues that the importance of the pre-Islamic Meccan trade has been grossly exaggerated. She also suggests that while Muhammad never traveled much beyond the Hijaz, internal evidence in the Qur'an, such as its description of Muhammad's polytheist opponents as "olive growers," might indicate that the events surrounding the Prophet took place near the Mediterranean region.

Beginning as a scholar of early military and economic history of the Middle East, Crone now works mainly on "the Qur’an and the cultural and religious traditions of Iraq, Iran, and the formerly Iranian part of Central Asia."

Bibliography

Sole author

• Slaves on Horses : The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980) ISBN 0-521-52940-9
• Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) ISBN 1-59333-102-9
• Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law : The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (1987, Paperback: 2002) ISBN 0-521-52949-2
• Pre-Industrial Societies : Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (2003) ISBN 1-85168-311-9
• God's Rule : Government and Islam. Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004). Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-13290-5. Also ISBN 0-231-13291-3.
• Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2005). Edinburgh University Press. New Ed edition. ISBN 0-7486-2194-6
• From Arabian Tribes to Islamic Empire : Army, State and Society in the Near East c.600-850 (2008). ISBN 978-0-7546-5925-9
• The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (2012). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107018792

Coauthor

• with M.A. Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) ISBN 0-521-29754-0
• with Martin Hinds, God's Caliph : Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (2003; orig. 1986) ISBN 0-521-54111-5

Articles

• Patricia Crone, "What do we actually know about Mohammed?", Open Democracy, 10 June 2008
• Patricia Crone, "'Jihad': idea and history", Open Democracy, 30 April 2007

External links

• Institute for Advanced Study: Faculty and Emeriti: Crone — homepage in Princeton.
• Review: God's Rule, Columbia University Press
• Patricia Crone, "The Rise of Islam", Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, section beginning at page 231, dealing with rise of Islam as reaction to Byzantine and Persian influence in Arabia, hosted at Fordham University