Hagarism
by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.
The authors looked long and hard at what non-Arabic sources tell us about the rise of Islam, about this new prophet Mohammed. Cook and Crone shed much light on how Mohammed united the Arab tribes and, of course, how Byzantium was so fundamentally changed by the rise of Islam.
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“Hagarism is the most exciting book I read as a young graduate. It made sense of the rise of Islam. Cook and Crone, the authors, looked long and hard at what non-Arabic sources tell us about the rise of Islam, and about this new prophet Mohammed. I got to know the authors and realised how seriously they undertook this delicate job. Islam is a living faith and there are people who interpret the written sources in Arabic, about the rise of Islam, in very particular ways. It was very difficult to find a way to make sense of the rise of Islam through non-Islamic sources which didn’t offend all these specialists. Many of them were offended. There’s no way you can be an outsider to a living tradition like Islam today and not upset certain Muslim believers and thinkers who have got their own historical analyses and different views. Cook and Crone shed much light on how Mohammed united the Arab tribes and of course how Byzantium was so fundamentally changed by the rise of Islam. We are talking about an extraordinary 40-year conquest by the end of which almost two-thirds of the Empire had been lost. That was an extraordinary thing for a centralised government to have to come to terms with.” Read more...
Judith Herrin, Historian
