Hagarism

The authors, interpreting 7th century Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew sources, put forward the hypothesis that Muhammad was alive during the conquest of Palestine (about two years longer than traditionally believed; the caliphate of Abu Bakr was hence a later invention). He led Jews and Hagarenes (Arabs) united under a faith loosely described as Judeo-Hagarism, as a prophet preaching the coming of a Judaic messiah who would redeem the Promised Land from the Christian Byzantines. This redeemer came in the person of Umar, as suggested by the Aramaic origins of his epithet Al-Faruq.

The

To combine the Abrahamic, Christian, and Samaritan elements, the role of Muhammad was recast as a prophet parallel to

The political theory of early Islam was based on two sources. The first was Samaritan high-priesthood, which joins political and religious authority and legitimises it on basis of religious knowledge and genealogy. Secondly, a resurgence of Judaic influences in Babylonian Iraq, which led to the reassertion of messianism in the form of mahdism, especially in Shia Islam. The identification as Hagarenes was replaced with the Samaritan notion of Islam (understood as submission or as a covenant of peace), its adherents becoming Muslims.

Consolidation in Iraq

The transition to a confident, recognisably Islamic identity, with its various borrowings assimilated, occurred in the late 7th century, during the reign of Abd al-Malik. However, its evolution continued. As power was transferred from Syria to Iraq, Islam incorporated the rabbinical culture of

In the second half of the eighth century, the early

Part I of the book ends by considering the peculiar state in which the Hagarenes found themselves: their own success pushed them away from the sanctuaries of Jerusalem and Mecca to Babylonia, as finalised by the Abbasid Revolution; Umar had already lived and there was no lost land or freedom to hope for. This led Sunni religious politics into quietism under a desanctified state, contrasted only with "Sufi resignation".

Wider context

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The remainder of the book, Parts II and III, discuss later developments and the larger context in which Islam originated: the Late Antique Near East, and relate it to theoretical themes of cultural history. This contrasts with the usual setting, focusing almost exclusively on Arabian indigenous polytheistic beliefs (

Hagarism was acknowledged as raising some interesting questions and being a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but it was described by Josef van Ess as an experiment.^[10] He argued that a “refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it (the hypothesis of the book) in detail ... Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous."^[10]

Jack Tannous, associate professor at Princeton, called the book "brilliantly provocative" in 2011. He commented:^[5]

Apart from Internet enthusiasts and religiously-motivated polemicists, nobody today, not even Cook and Crone themselves, believes that the picture of early Islam put forth in Hagarism is an accurate one. But the legacy of Hagarism has endured, for in one thin little volume, Cook and Crone put their fingers on a nagging problem in an electric way. ... As a book making a specific argument, Hagarism was ultimately a failure, but in its stimulus of further research, writing, debate, and especially by challenging Islamicists to look beyond the confines of Arabic sources to the rich literatures of the Middle East that existed before, during, and after the rise of Islam, Hagarism was one of those rare books that changed a field.

David Waines, professor at Lancaster University, states:^[2]

The Crone-Cook theory has been almost universally rejected. The evidence offered by the authors is far too tentative and conjectural (and possibly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish relations were as intimate as they would wish them to have been. ... The book, nevertheless, has raised serious and legitimate questions by emphasizing the difficulty in employing the Muslim sources for a reconstruction of Islamic origins.

— An Introduction to Islam

The journalist Toby Lester commented in The Atlantic that Hagarism was a notorious work, and that when it was published it "came under immediate attack, from Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike, for its heavy reliance on hostile sources." He added that, "Crone and Cook have since backed away from some of its most radical propositions—such as, for example, that Muhammad lived two years longer than the Muslim tradition claims he did, and that the historicity of his migration to Medina is questionable."^[14]

According to Liaquat Ali Khan who claimed to have interviewed Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, both of them would have later suggested that the central thesis of the book was mistaken because the evidence they had to support the thesis was not sufficient or internally consistent enough. Patricia Crone would have suggested to him that the book was “a graduate essay" and "a hypothesis," not "a conclusive finding", but they did nothing to acknowledge it publicly. Khan wrote that "Cook and Crone have made no manifest effort to repudiate their juvenile findings in the book. The authors admitted to me that they had not done it and cater no plans to do so."^[15]

Scholarly reviews

John Wansbrough, who had mentored the authors, reviewed the book, specifically the first part. He begins by praising the book claiming, "the authors' erudition is extraordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient." But, he says that "most, if not all, [of the sources] have been or can be challenged on suspicion of inauthenticity" and that "the material is upon occasion misleadingly represented ... 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."^[16]

Robert Bertram Serjeant wrote that Hagarism is "not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a 'leg pull', pure 'spoof'."^[17]

Eric Manheimer commented that, "The research on Hagarism is thorough, but this reviewer feels that the conclusions drawn lack balance. The weights on the scales tip too easily toward the hypercritical side, tending to distract from what might have been an excellent study in comparative religion."^[18]

Oleg Grabar described Hagarism as a "brilliant, fascinating, original, arrogant, highly debatable book" and writes that "the authors' fascination with lapidary formulas led them to cheap statements or to statements which require unusual intellectual gymnastics to comprehend and which become useless, at best cute" and that "... the whole construction proposed by the authors lacks entirely in truly historical foundations" but also praised the authors for trying to "relate the Muslim phenomenon to broad theories of acculturation and historical change."^[19] The classicist Norman O. Brown wrote in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991) that Hagarism, "illustrates in an ominous way the politics of Orientalism", and citing Grabar's review, added that, "The Western tradition of urbane condescension has degenerated into aggressive, unscrupulous even, calumny".^[20]