Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) is a controversial, scholarly book on the early history of Islam written by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. Drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac, Hagarism depicts an early Islam very different from the traditionally-accepted version derived from Muslim historical accounts.[1][2]
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The word Hagarism relates to the 7th century Arabian Peninsula Hagarene tribes, ie the descendants of the Egyptian servant girl Hagar.
According to the book Hagarism, the Arab conquests and the formation of the caliphate were a peninsular Arab movement inspired by Jewish messianism, which, in alliance with Jews, attempted to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantine Empire. The Qur'an would then be the product of 8th-century edits of various materials drawn from a variety of Judeo-Christian and Middle-Eastern sources, and Muhammad the herald of Umar "the redeemer", a Judaic messiah.[3]
Hagarism begins with the premise that Western historical scholarship on the beginnings of Islam should only be based on historical, archaeological and philological data rather than Islamic traditions which it finds to be dogmatically-based, historically irreconcilable and anachronistic accounts of the community's past, and of no historic value. Thus, relying exclusively on historical, archaeological and philological evidence, the authors attempt to reconstruct and present what they argue is a more historically accurate account of Islam's origins. In summary:
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.[4]
According to the authors, 7th century Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew sources depict the formation of Islam as a Jewish messianic movement known as Hagarism which migrated into the Fertile Crescent, drawing considerable influences from the Samaritans and Babylonian Judaism. Around 690 AD the movement shed its Judaic identity to morph into what would later become Arab Islam.[5] The surviving records of the period describe the followers of Muhammad as Hagarenes, because of the way Muhammad invoked the Jewish god in order to introduce an alien monotheistic faith to the Arabs. He is reported as doing this by claiming biological descent from Abraham through his slave wife Hagar for the Arabs in the same way as the Jews who claimed descent from Abraham through Sarah and thus as their ancestral faith. During this early period the Jews and the Hagarenes united, into a faith the authors loosely describe as Judeo-Hagarism, in order to recover the holy land from the Christian Byzantines. In their analysis, the 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.
As time went on, the Hagarenes concluded that the adoption of Judaism and Christian Messianism did not provide them with the unique religious identity that they aspired for. They also feared that leaning on Judaism too much, might result in outright conversion and assimilation. Thus the hagarenes contrived to create a religion of their own and decided to splinter off from their Judaic practices and beliefs. Driven by a quest for theological legitimacy they devised a version of Abrahamic monotheism, that evolved from a blend of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity, which became what is now Islam. The authors propose that Islam was thus born and fashioned from Judaic mythology and symbology, that is; the creation of a sacred scripture similar to the Jewish Torah - (the Qur’an), and a Moses like prophet; along with a sacred city of Mecca modeled on the Jewish holy city of Jerusalem adjacent to a holy mountain.
Hagarism is widely cited by many modern historians of early Islam, including Bernard Lewis,[6] Robert G. Hoyland,[7] Reza Aslan,[8] G. R. Hawting,[9][10] Herbert Berg,[11] Francis Edwards Peters,[12] S. N. Eisenstadt,[13] Ziauddin Sardar,[14] Malise Ruthven,[15] Richard Landes,[16] and John Wansbrough,[17][1] as well as critics (like Ibn Warraq[18]). It is on the suggested reading list of the School of Oriental and African Studies of London [2] and other various major universities' Middle East studies reading lists [3][4].
In 1995, Michael Lecker proposed much more conservative theories of early Jewish/Islamic relations in The conversion of Himyar to Judaism and the Jewish Banu Hadl of Medina,[19] and Judaism among Kinda and the ridda of Kinda[20] and Zayd b. Thabit, 'a Jew with two sidelocks': Judaism and literacy in pre-Islamic Medina (Yatrib).[21]
In 1997, Robert G. Hoyland described the legacy of Hagarism this way: "Almost two decades ago Patricia Crone and Michael Cook followed French historian Claude Cahen's advice in their reconstruction of the rise of Islam, which they attempted to write on the basis of testimony external to Islamic tradition. Yet, with a few notable exceptions [Conrad and Morony for example] this line of inquiry has not been pursued. This is unfortunate ... surely if one wishes to gain a proper understanding of the events and developments of this age, one must elicit the opinions of all those who participated in them... It is this belief and the example of the aforementioned scholars [referring to Crone & Cook] that have inspired this book ["Seeing Islam as others saw it"]"[22] He characterizes hagarism as evolving into wider inter-disciplinary and promiscuous literary approach, and goes on to say that further studies will emerge in the Studies in Late Antiquity and Early series in which his book appears. Since then the "SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies"[23] has also collected a selection of authors who are continuing in a modified form of this theory.
In 2002, David Cook in discussing the A'maq Cycle of historical apocalypses says that this genre of Islamic literature "could in fact be based on some historical kernel, since ... the Muslims shared with the Jews the desire to build the Third Temple"[24]
In 2005, John C. Reeves says that Hagarism needs to do much basic research before it can propose bold theories. It "is an important area of research that has been largely uncultivated by modern Western scholars, and hence a comparative study across the religious boundaries of the confessional corpora remains very much in its infancy. One of the more important tasks ... involves the systematic identification, collation, and publication of the massive number of late antique and early medieval apocalyptic texts lurking in the manuscript collections of libraries and research institutes around the world."[25]
Generally while acknowledged as raising a few interesting questions and being a fresh approach its reconstruction of early Islamic history has been dismissed by some as an experiment[26] and criticised for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..."[27] The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted.[28]