Michael Cook (historian)
Michael Cook | |
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Notable works | Hagarism (1977) Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000) |
Website | nes |
Michael Allan Cook
Biography
Michael Cook developed an early interest in Turkey and Ottoman history and studied history and oriental studies at
Research
In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Cook and his associate Patricia Crone provided a new analysis of early Islamic history by studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam. They fundamentally questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam. Thus they tried to produce the picture of Islam's beginnings only from non-Arabic sources. By studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, which were written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses, they reconstructed a significantly different story of Islam's beginnings, compared with the story known from the Islamic traditions. Cook and Crone claimed to be able to explain exactly how Islam came into being by the fusion of various near eastern civilizations under Arabic leadership. Later, Michael Cook refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings, and concentrated on Islamic ethics and law.[2] Patricia Crone later suggested that the book was “a graduate essay" and "a hypothesis," not "a conclusive finding.”[3]
In his work
Cook is also known for synthetic works for a general audience, including The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000) and A Brief History of the Human Race (Norton, 2003). Cook served as general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam, which covers fourteen centuries of Muslim history. This six-volume project was selected as winner of the 2011 Waldo G. Leland Prize for the “most outstanding reference tool in the field of history” published between 1 May 2006, and 30 April 2011.
Criticism
Cook addresses his approach to navigating the politics of scholarship on Islam in a video for the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. In his words, he claims that "I personally see my academic role not as being anybody's advocate for or against. I hold onto a kind of ideal of objectivity, which I am sure I don't fully realize...I didn't like the philo-Islamic pull and I don't like the anti-Islamic pull. They are kind of a distraction from scholarship."[7]
Recognition
- In 2001 he was chosen to be a member of the American Philosophical Society.
- In 2001 he received the Albert Hourani Book Award[8]
- In 2002 he received the prestigious $1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the ]
- In 2004 he was chosen to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[10]
- In 2006 he won Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton.
- In 2008 he won Farabi Award in the Humanities and Islamic Studies.
- In 2013 he and Patricia Crone were awarded an honorary doctorate at Leiden University.[11]
- In 2014 he won the Holberg Prize
- In 2019 he won the Balzan Prize
Works
- Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, with Patricia Crone.
- Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study, 1981.
- Muhammad (Past Masters), 1983.
- The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, 2000.
- Albert Hourani Book Award).
- Forbidding Wrong in Islam: An Introduction (Themes in Islamic History), 2003.
- A Brief History of the Human Race, New York 2003.
- Studies in the Origins of Early Islamic Culture and Tradition, 2004.
- (ed.): The New Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. (six vols, 4,929pp)[12]
- Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, 2014
- A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, 2024
- Cook, Michael: (1981) Early muslim dogma. A source critical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ISBN 0-521-23379-8.[4]
- Cook, Michael: (2000) Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0521-661749.[4]
Notes
- ^ Michael Allan Cook Archived 14 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine at Holberg Prize page
- ^ "Holberg Price 2014: About Michael Cook". Archived from the original on 14 August 2016. Retrieved 14 August 2016.
- ISSN 1556-5068.
- ^ a b c Custers, Martin H. (2016). Al-Ibāḍiyya: A Bibliography, Volume 3 (Second revised and enlarged ed.). Hildesheim-London-N.Y.: Olms Publishing. p. 179.
- JSTOR 25210922.
- ISSN 0002-7189.
- ^ "Michael Cook: How being a historian of Islam has changed in the past 15 years". Youtube. Archived from the original on 14 December 2021. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
- ^ Albert Hourani Book Award Archived 16 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ 2002 Distinguished Achievement Award Recipients Archived 18 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine Mellon Foundation
- ^ Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Archived 5 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 10 February 2010
- ^ "Honorary Doctorates at Leiden for Arabists Patricia Crone & Michael Cook and for translator Rien Verhoef". Leiden University. Retrieved 9 February 2013.
- ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 28 August 2019.
External links
- Faculty description page at Princeton University.
- In 384 pages? Cook chronicles history of the human race by Jennifer Altmann, Princeton Weekly Bulletin, 14 June 2004