Hagarism

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, is a controversial book on the early history of Islam authored by historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook with contributions from a number of notable historiographers of Islam such as G. R. Hawting and Bernard Lewis.

In Hagarism the authors make a detailed examination of the archeological , Arabic, Armenian , Coptic, Greek , Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac records of the early 7th century and present their findings along with corresponding primary sources.

The historical documents presented in the book seem to indicate that the Arab conquests and the formation of the caliphate was a movement of peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by Jewish messianism and allied with the Jews to try to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantines. The authors present historical documentation that supports the thesis that the Qur'an was the product of 8th century editings of materials taken from a multitude of Judeo-Christian and Middle-Eastern sources and Muhammad is recorded as the herald of Umar as a Judeaic messiah.

Thesis

According to the authors Hagarism was a heretical branch of Judaism followed by the Hagarenes or Arabs in the in the early part of the 7th century. The surviving records of the period describe the followers of Muhammad as hagarenes based on the way Muhammad invoked the God of the Jews in order to present an alien monotheism to the Arabs as their ancestral faith by claiming biological descendancy from Abraham through his slave wife Hagar in the same way as the Jews who claimed descendancy from Abraham through Sarah. During this early period , the Jews and the Hagarenes united into a faith losely described as Judeo-Hagarism in order to recover the holy land, (modern day Israel and the Palestinian territories) from the Christian Byzantines who had expelled the Jews from those lands. Eventually the Hagarenes splintered off from the Jews, and went on to devise a version of Abrahamic monotheism which would evolve into what is now Islam drawing from a blend of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity. Islam was thus born and fashioned after the Judaic mythology and symbology with the creation of a sacred scripture similar to the Jewish Torah - (the Qur’an), and a Mose like prophet along with a sacred city of (Medina) modeled on the Jewish holy city adjacent to a holy mountain .

Hagarism begins with the premise that Western historical scholarship on the beginnings of Islam should be based on historical, archeological and philological data rather than Islamic traditions which they find 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.

While the full assertions of the book were controversial, the attempts to deconstruct early Islamic history make this a groundbreaking and important work in early Islamic history.

Sources

Drawing from early non-Muslim historical sources such as the Doctrina Iacobi AD 634 and numerous others listed in the table below, the authors document their thesis that Muhammad was preaching a heretical form of Judaism around 634AD and was proclaiming the advent of a Jewish Messiah. Early manuscripts from eye witnesses suggest that Muhammad was the leader of a military expedition to conquer Jerusalem, and that the original Hijra actually referred to a journey from northern Arabia to that city.

634 Doctrina Iacobi	650 Fredegar	676 The Synod of 676	692 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephraem	717 The Vision of Enoch the Just
636 Fragment on the Arab Conquests	655 Pope Martin I	680 George of Resh'aina	697 Anti-Jewish Polemicists	717 A Monk of Beth Hale and an Arab Notable
639 Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem	659 Isho'yahb III of Adiabene	680 The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai	700 Anastasius of Sinai	720 Greek Interpolation of the Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius
640 Thomas the Presbyter	660 Sebeos, Bishop of the Bagratunis	680 Bundahishn	700 Hnanisho' the Exegete	720 Willibald
640 Homily on the Child Saints of Babylon	660 A Chronicler of Khuzistan	681 Trophies of Damascus	705 Ad Annum 705	730 Patriarch Germanus
640 John of Nikiu	662 Maximus the Confessor	687 Athanasius of Balad, Patriarch of Antioch	708 Jacob of Edessa	730 John of Damascus
644 Coptic Apocalypse of Pseudo-Shenute	665 Benjamin I	687 John bar Penkaye	715 Coptic Apocalpyse of Pseudo-Athanasius	770 A Maronite Chronicler
648 Life of Gabriel of Qartmin	670 Arculf, a Pilgrim	690 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius	717 Greek Daniel,First Vision	780 Isho'bokht, Metropolitan of Fars
785 Stephen of Alexandria	785 Theophilus of Edessa	801 T'ung tien

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 extraordinary their industry everywhere evident, their prose ebullient." However, he later comments 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..." He concludes that their research, while good, was used by their methodology to make too grandiose 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."

Generally while acknowledged as raising a few interesting questions and being a fresh approach it's reconstruction of early Islamic history has been dismissed as an experiment and criticised for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..." The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted.

• 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 Western Islamic scholars believe that Islam borrowed from Jewish, Christian, and other traditions.

• David Waines, Professor of Islamic Studies Lancaster University states:

"The Crone-Cook theory has been almost universally rejected. The evidence offered by the authors is far too tentative and conjectural (and possibilly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish were as intimate as they would wish them to have been."

Legal scholar Liaquat Ali Khan posted an opinion piece on the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel website whose title "Hagarism: The Story of a Book Written by Infidels for Infidels" is based of a claim to the same in the book claimed

The book titled "Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World," questions just about everything Muslims believe as historical truths. It challenges the common belief that the Quran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad over a period of 22 years (610-632) in Mecca and Medina. Instead, the book contends that the Quran was composed, possibly in Syria or Iraq, more than fifty years after the Prophet's death, projected back in time, and attributed to the Prophet.

The Quran, according to the book, was fabricated during the reign of Caliph Abdul Malik (685-705) to legitimize an expanding empire. The book also contends that the word Muslim was invented in the 8th century to replace the word Muhajirun (immigrants), which was the original name of the Arab community that conquered Palestine and built the Dome of the Rock.

The book itself prescribes a new name for early Muslims. It calls them Hagarenes, that is, the biological descendants of Abraham by Hagar. This racial naming of early Muslims is employed to distinguish them from Jews, who are the descendants of Abraham by Sarah. Hagarism, the book's title, is a quasi-pejorative, and possibly a racist, label to describe the historical phenomenon of early Muslims.

Hagarism is "another book in the large dump of attack literature" and an attack on "the Quran’s authenticity, the Prophet’s integrity, [and] Islamic history". He stated that he has had private correspondence with the authors and stating that Michael Cook had said, "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" and that Patricia Crone had said, "The book was just a hypothesis, not a conclusive finding," and "I do not think that the book's thesis is valid." Ali Khan also states, "Part of the confusion arises from the fact 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."

Impact

Nevertheless the ground breaking impact of the book upon academic circles is demonstrated by the amount of discussion it has and continues to generate among many contemporary historiographers and historians of early Islam, such as: Bernard Lewis, Robert G. Hoyland, Reza Aslan, G. R. Hawting, Herbert Berg, Francis Edwards Peters, S. N. Eisenstadt, Ziauddin Sardar, Malise Ruthven,Richard Landes, Ibn Warraq and John Wansbrough. It is on the suggested reading list of the School of Oriental and African Studies of London [1] and other various major universities' Middle East studies reading lists [2][3].

See also

• Historiography of early Islam
• External References to Islam.

Further reading

• The Historical Problem of Islamic Origins