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Theme Changer

 Topic: Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone

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  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     OP - October 14, 2014, 03:38 PM



    New book - out in December
    http://www.brill.com/products/book/islamic-cultures-islamic-contexts
    Quote
    This volume brings together articles on various aspects of the intellectual and social
    histories of Islamicate societies and of the traditions and contexts that contributed to their
    formation and evolution. Written by leading scholars who span three generations and
    who cover such diverse fields as Late Antique Studies, Islamic Studies, Classics, and Jewish
    Studies, the volume is a testament to the breadth and to the sustained, deep impact of the
    corpus of the honoree, Professor Patricia Crone.

    Contributors are: David Abulafia, Asad Q. Ahmed, Karen Bauer, Michael Cooperson, Hannah Cotton, David M. Eisenberg, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Matthew S. Gordon, Gerald Hawting, Judith Herrin, Robert Hoyland, Bella Tendler Krieger, Margaret Larkin, Maria Mavroudi, Christopher Melchert, Pavel Pavlovitch, David Powers, Chase Robinson, Behnam Sadeghi, Adam Silverstein, Devin Stewart, Guy Stroumsa, D. G. Tor, Kevin van Bladel, David J. Wasserstein, Chris Wickam, Joseph Witztum, F. W. Zimmermann

    -----------

    Table of Contents

    Introduction
    Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Robert Hoyland, Adam Silverstein

    Variant Traditions, Relative Chronology and the Study of Intra-Quranic parallels
    Joseph Witztum

    The Earliest Attestation of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P. Nessana 77 (AH 60s/AD 680)
    Robert Hoyland with Appendix by Hannah Cotton

    Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins
    Guy Stroumsa

    A Note on the Relationship Between Tafsīr and Documentary Evidence With Reference to Contracts of Marriage
    Karen Bauer

    Earnest Money’ and the Sources of Islamic Law
    Gerald Hawting and David Eisenberg

    A Bequest May Not Exceed One-Third’: An Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis – and Beyond
    Pavel Pavlovich and David Powers

    Basra and Kufa as the Earliest Centers of Islamic Legal Controversy
    Christopher Melchert

    God's Cleric: Al-Fuḍayl b. ʿIyāḍ and the Transition from Caliphal to Prophetic Sunna
    Deborah Tor

    Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn and the Politics of Deference
    Matthew Gordon

    Eighth-Century Indian Astronomy in the Two Cities of Peace
    Kevin van Bladel

    Greek Language and Education Under Early Islam
    Maria Mavroudi

    Kalām and the Greeks
    Fritz Zimmermann

    ‘Arabs’ and ‘Iranians’: The Uses of Ethnicity in the Early Abbasid Period
    Michael Cooperson

    The Poetics of Cultural Identity: Al-Mutanabbī among the Būyids
    Margaret Larkin

    Must God Tell Us the Truth? A Problem in Ash‘arī Theology
    Khaled El Rouayheb

    Administrators’ Time: The Social Memory of the Early Medieval State, East and West
    Chris Wickham

    An Eleventh-Century Justification of the Authority of Twelver Shiite Jurists
    Devin Stewart

    A Family Story: Ambiguities of Jewish Identity in Medieval Islam
    David Wasserstein

    What happened in al-Andalus: Minorities in al-Andalus and in Christian Spain
    David Abulafia

    The Samaritan Version of the Esther Story
    Adam Silverstein

    New Evidence for the Survival of Sexually Libertine Rites among some Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs of the Nineteenth Century
    Bella Tendler

    Crone and the End of Orientalism
    Chase Robinson

    Patricia Crone – A Brief Memoir
    Judith Herrin


    Shame about the €197 price tag - why are all the interesting books on Islam priced like this?
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #1 - October 14, 2014, 04:43 PM

    pdf of Chase Robinson's essay - Crone and the end of orientalism

    http://chaserobinson.net/files/2013/09/Crone-and-the-end-of-Orientalism.pdf

    Also here's a pdf of an essay which isn't in the book - History and Heilsgeschichte in early Islam: Some observations on prophetic history and biography

    http://chaserobinson.net/files/2014/03/HeilgeschichteMarch2014.pdf
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #2 - October 14, 2014, 05:28 PM

    Book looks awesome, price looks ridiculous ... hopefully a paperback version will come out.

    That Chase Robinson essay is great, I have read it a couple times before, love it.

    Would love to read these essays, but it looks like I won't get much of a chance:

    The Earliest Attestation of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P. Nessana 77 (AH 60s/AD 680)
    Robert Hoyland with Appendix by Hannah Cotton

    Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins
    Guy Stroumsa

    Earnest Money’ and the Sources of Islamic Law
    Gerald Hawting and David Eisenberg

    A Bequest May Not Exceed One-Third’: An Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis – and Beyond
    Pavel Pavlovich and David Powers
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #3 - October 14, 2014, 05:39 PM

    Btw, although Chase Robinson is more conservative than my own views (he is primarily a historian, and I think less capable then other scholars when it comes to analyzing the Qur'an and earliest Islam), I think he does a great job of concisely explaining what I also take to be the decisive step in the transformation of (a) the remnants of Mohammed's failed apocalyptic movement to (b) Islam.  Before he became taken up as a political weapon in the 680s between warring Umayyad factions, *nobody cared much about Muhammad, or the Qur'an*.  I do not agree with Robinson when he says "[t]oo much can be made of the silence," but I do agree with his analysis of the key transformation and why it happened.
       
    "The absence of any mention of Muḥammad across all the surviving material evidence for most of the seventh century is well known, and contrasts sharply with the frequency with which his name appears, starting in the 680s, particularly on coins, which circulated widely across the caliphate. Too much can be made of the silence (Johns 2003). What appears to be the most promising explanation for the change lies in the transformations — in both scale and language of legitimacy — of the Umayyad state at the end of the seventh century. It appears that opponents to Umayyad rule had seized upon Muḥammad as a symbol in the 680s; and the ruling clan of the Umayyads, the Marwanids (692 - 750), responded in kind, initiating a series of reforms that, inter alia , featured the profession of monotheism and prophecy of Muḥammad. Putting things in structural terms, one might say that as Umayyad Staatlichkeit grew at the expense of less formal networks of loyalty and obedience in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, so, too, did the need for a transcendent symbol of rule. The material evidence can thus document the Umayyads’ patronage of Muḥammad as legitimizing symbol, a fact that is presumably not unrelated to the patronage they offered to scholars collecting accounts that would be included in Prophetic biography, as we shall see."

    Almost exactly my own view there.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #4 - October 14, 2014, 06:14 PM

    Quote
    It appears that opponents to Umayyad rule had seized upon Muḥammad as a symbol in the 680s; and the ruling clan of the Umayyads, the Marwanids (692 - 750), responded in kind, initiating a series of reforms that, inter alia , featured the profession of monotheism and prophecy of Muḥammad.

    Zaotar - is there clear evidence for the first part of this statement (opponents of the Umayyads seizing upon Muhammad as a symbol) or is it more conjectural?
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #5 - October 14, 2014, 06:34 PM

    It has to do with the Second Fitna (btw I have serious doubts about the historicity of the First Fitna), the Second Fitna being the epic struggle between the Zubayrids and Abd al Malik, both of whom claimed to be the 'true' caliph.  Both sides seized upon Mohammed as a symbol and justification for their movement. 

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Fitna

    All the evidence points to Ibn al Zubayr painting himself as the 'true inheritor' of Mohammed's movement, now centered in the Hijaz that the Zubayrids ruled, against the infidel Syrian Umayyads who were led by that accursed Abd al Malik.  Both 'caliphates' argued for their legitimacy by appealing to Mohammed's prophetic validation.  But the Hijazi caliphate was defeated.  In 692 Ibn al Zubayr was killed by Al Hajjaj, governor for Abd al Malik, in the siege of Mecca in 692.  Interestingly Abd al Malik is increasingly assigned responsibility for the authoritative distribution and imposition of the "Uthmanic" Qur'an that we know today, along with destroying all variant versions.

    I suspect that the real reason Mecca figures so heavily in Muslim narrative is because it was a very good *military* base for the Zubayrid caliphate, being highly defensible and remote.  Thus as an artifact of the practical fact that the Zubayrids were operating from that defensive position, the sacred status of Mecca was 'written into' the Mohammedan mythology, tying the Zubayrid caliphate's sacred legitimacy with its occupation and base in Mecca, now alleged to be where the prophet had lived in the vague years before he became associated with Medina.  Ibn al-Zubayr, in other words, was literally the 'representative' or 'successor' to Mohammed (i.e. caliph), and thus claimed that he was operating in the same sacred place that Mohammed had operated.

    I believe it is very likely that much of the Hijazi and Meccan background of Islam was contrived by the Zubayrid faction as part of their opposition to Abd al Malik, telling the story of a pure Hijazi past which Abd al Malik (rather than jettisoning) seized as part of his own imperial mythology (since it was so powerful, and since Syria could hardly be used for the same purposes).  Via Al Hajjaj and such institutions as creating the Dome of the Rock, the imperial "Islam" emerged at this time, a distinctive Arab religion.

    The very first dated mention of the word "Mohammed" that we have, in fact, is on a coin issued by Ibn al Zubayr in Persia, prior to his flight to the Hijaz.  In other words, it was his innovation.  A few years later we see Abd al Malik copying that usage on his own coins.  Prior to this point, the Arabs had issued coins but they generically praised "Allah," no mention of Mohammed, the Qur'an, Muslims, or Islam.  Thus Ibn al Zubayr seems to have been the first to have made "Mohammedanism" the basis for his claim to political and religious authority.

    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/

    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/drachm1.html
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #6 - October 14, 2014, 06:36 PM

    the price! €197,00 ($255.00)

    I would've bought it if it was affordable

    "we can smell traitors and country haters"


    God is Love.
    Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.

  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #7 - October 14, 2014, 06:44 PM

    Thanks Zaotar.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #8 - October 14, 2014, 07:23 PM

    That History and Heilsgeschichte essay is really good.  Finished it.  Thanks for the post.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #9 - October 14, 2014, 09:14 PM

    It has to do with the Second Fitna (btw I have serious doubts about the historicity of the First Fitna), the Second Fitna being the epic struggle between the Zubayrids and Abd al Malik, both of whom claimed to be the 'true' caliph.  Both sides seized upon Mohammed as a symbol and justification for their movement. 

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Fitna

    All the evidence points to Ibn al Zubayr painting himself as the 'true inheritor' of Mohammed's movement, now centered in the Hijaz that the Zubayrids ruled, against the infidel Syrian Umayyads who were led by that accursed Abd al Malik.  Both 'caliphates' argued for their legitimacy by appealing to Mohammed's prophetic validation.  But the Hijazi caliphate was defeated.  In 692 Ibn al Zubayr was killed by Al Hajjaj, governor for Abd al Malik, in the siege of Mecca in 692.  Interestingly Abd al Malik is increasingly assigned responsibility for the authoritative distribution and imposition of the "Uthmanic" Qur'an that we know today, along with destroying all variant versions.

    I suspect that the real reason Mecca figures so heavily in Muslim narrative is because it was a very good *military* base for the Zubayrid caliphate, being highly defensible and remote.  Thus as an artifact of the practical fact that the Zubayrids were operating from that defensive position, the sacred status of Mecca was 'written into' the Mohammedan mythology, tying the Zubayrid caliphate's sacred legitimacy with its occupation and base in Mecca, now alleged to be where the prophet had lived in the vague years before he became associated with Medina.  Ibn al-Zubayr, in other words, was literally the 'representative' or 'successor' to Mohammed (i.e. caliph), and thus claimed that he was operating in the same sacred place that Mohammed had operated.

    I believe it is very likely that much of the Hijazi and Meccan background of Islam was contrived by the Zubayrid faction as part of their opposition to Abd al Malik, telling the story of a pure Hijazi past which Abd al Malik (rather than jettisoning) seized as part of his own imperial mythology (since it was so powerful, and since Syria could hardly be used for the same purposes).  Via Al Hajjaj and such institutions as creating the Dome of the Rock, the imperial "Islam" emerged at this time, a distinctive Arab religion.

    The very first dated mention of the word "Mohammed" that we have, in fact, is on a coin issued by Ibn al Zubayr in Persia, prior to his flight to the Hijaz.  In other words, it was his innovation.  A few years later we see Abd al Malik copying that usage on his own coins.  Prior to this point, the Arabs had issued coins but they generically praised "Allah," no mention of Mohammed, the Qur'an, Muslims, or Islam.  Thus Ibn al Zubayr seems to have been the first to have made "Mohammedanism" the basis for his claim to political and religious authority.

    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/

    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/drachm1.html


    "infidel Syrian Umayyads"

    I think this also highlights a shift in political, military and economic control. Mecca and Medina were becoming only important in terms of religion. Both lacked the infrastructure to support a growing empire. Arabia also lacked this infrastructure except in the case of the southern areas. The economic centers were in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Persia. The military garrison cites were also in these areas. This would cause political control to shift to these areas as well.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #10 - October 14, 2014, 09:47 PM

    Mecca ... was a very good *military* base for the Zubayrid caliphate, being highly defensible and remote. 

    Seems odd, this. I'd have imagined Mecca to be utterly dependent for supplies on caravan routes that could be easily disrupted. Or was there enough underground water to make the base self-sufficient?
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #11 - October 14, 2014, 10:01 PM

    Have you forgotten about the mystical "Zam Zam well"?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzam_Well

    It's true Mecca doesn't have much food, but plainly enough to last for the seven months (!!!) that the Zubayrids held out against al Hajjaj.  So if one asks whether Mecca was a good defensive base, I would say that it certainly proved incredibly hard to besiege.  Just getting enemy troops there is a nightmare, and you can supply it from several different directions.  The logistical issue goes both ways, the enemy's supply lines are highly exposed as they tromp into the barren desert.  And they have no wells either.

    So if there's anywhere in Arabia that one might defend, Mecca is pretty high on the list.  The traditional Muslim history even reports that ibn al Zubayr 'fled' to Mecca when Yazid took over the Umayyad caliphate, and from there directed his counterattack, so plainly it was viewed as a defensible location in the first instance.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_Allah_ibn_al-Zubayr

    A rather shocking note is that when al-Hajjaj finally prevailed with his siege of Mecca, he beheaded and crucified ibn al-Zubayr (!).  When people say that Islamic State isn't truly "Muslim," I wonder if they are really familiar with the Umayyad caliphate --- it is fairly difficult to distinguish its behavior from Islamic State.  One might well say that Islamic State's behavior reflects only a small portion of Islam, but it is an early and prominent portion that cannot be readily discarded.  Abd al Malik himself first ascended to power by defeating his rival, who he then walked around the city on a silver dog chain (!!!) and then finishing by straddling him, beheading him, and throwing the decapitated head over the wall to his devastated supporters.  The dog chain was an especially nice touch.  Chase Robinson relates this astounding anecdote in his book on Abd al Malik.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #12 - October 14, 2014, 10:28 PM

    Have you forgotten about the mystical "Zam Zam well"?

    How could I?

  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #13 - October 15, 2014, 12:30 AM

    Gods below, what a slap in the face to Muslims to hear their entire religion is a tissue of lies and a supreme irony that Mecca's supposed significance was totally made up. It's a bit like the Roman empire coopting the legend of Jesus into a new machinery of state.

    Is there historical evidence from Syriac Christians to support the existence of a Muhammadan apocalyptic movement around Syria or the Levant? I find it interesting the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock affirm the prophethood of Jesus (but not his divinity) while also putting Muhammad as the last in the line of Abrahamic prophets. That means the Umayyad conquerors were trying to convert the local Christians while maintaining an air of legitimacy by linking Muhammad to Jesus.

    But then why maintain the Mecca focus in the Qur'an, unless it was meant more to convince the Arabs of the Hijaz than the Christians and Jews outside?
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #14 - October 15, 2014, 12:49 AM

    Just like the same link given to Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome in Christianity. A religious link and for the sake of the narrative. The major difference is this link is reinforced by religious requirements in the form of a pilgrimage. Even with this link both centers became footnotes in the history of the Muslim Empires.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #15 - October 15, 2014, 01:30 AM

    The Qur'an doesn't have a "Meccan focus."

    That's the joke.  For a book to have a "Meccan focus," one would expect it to mention "makkah" more than once in the entire book (and that in cryptic fashion).  That's not what 'focus' ordinarily means.

    If you are asking the separate question of why Islamic tradition later focused on Mecca, my argument is that set forth above -- in reality it was completely unknown to later Muslims what the geographical provenance was of the anonymous monotheistic preaching that is the earliest layer of Qur'anic texts, and later artificially divided as "Meccan."  But it was readily apparent that these were texts delivered in very different social circumstances and religious consequences, so some explanation had to be made for that.  My belief, as argued above, is that it was religiously convenient to locate the Arabian prophet deep within pagan Mecca, to isolate his alleged revelations from their actual historical origins in Christian/Jewish influences and anonymous preaching circulating in the literate Northern regions; also, to exalt the Zubayrid caliph, styling his Mecca-based regime as the true successor to Mohammed.  Put another way, Mecca was as good of a candidate as you could have come up with sitting in Medina, given such ideology.

    As for the contemporary evidence of a Mohammedan apocalyptic movement in Palestine (a somewhat separate issue), Chase Robinson does a good summary of Shoemaker in that Heilsgeschichte essay, so I'll just cut and paste his explanation:

    "The second problem is posed by a set of contradictions: eleven alternative accounts, some first discussed by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook forty years ago, but recently filled out and thoroughly examined in a monograph by Stephen Shoemaker, which would have it that Muḥammad was alive at the time of the conquest of Palestine. Since these events can be securely dated to 634 or 635, his death in 632 is obviously thrown into some doubt (Crone and Cook, 1977; Shoemaker 2012). The earliest is a Greek text composed in about 634; thereupon follow a Hebrew source written between 635 and 645, a Syriac account from about 660, several more Syriac texts from the later seventh and eighth centuries, a Coptic account (translated from a now-lost original Arabic), one in Latin (written in 741), a piece of Samaritan Arabic and, finally, a document that is conventionally known as Umar’s letter to Leo, which survives in eighth-century Armenian.  It is a pretty good haul of evidence: Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and Coptic sources, written by Christians and Jews of multiple confessions and orientations, who were composing in a wide variety of literary genres, for varying audiences, in Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Northern Mesopotamia and south-west Iran.
         This said, there is no question of necessarily privileging non - Muslim sources over Muslim ones, of replacing 632 with 634 or 635; they may be early, but they are often subject to severe bias of their own, and besides, some can be adduced to corroborate the Islamic tradition on matters both major and minor (Hoyland 1997; Robinson 2004). But such an impressive spread of texts, the majority of which pre-date the earliest biographical accounts from within the Islamic tradition, cannot be wished away, especially, as Shoemaker argues, because accounts from within the Islamic tradition can be adduced to support their claim that Muḥammad ’s message was principally eschatological, and that his geographic focus was Jerusalem, rather than Mecca (Shoemaker 2012; cf. Crone and Cook 1977, and Donner 2010, 142 -4.). The eschaton having failed to appear, one may further argue, such accounts were marginalized, and the Prophet was accordingly reconceived as a social reformer. In this connection, one cannot resist the obvious attractiveness in viewing Muḥammad as an eschatological seer: it nicely explains the absence of Muḥammad as a legitimizing symbol early on — that is, while memories were still fresh. Why ground one’s claim in claims that had proven wrong? Besides, the Umayyads were in the business of ruling for the long run.  Given that dating schemes were introduced only secondarily into sīra material, as we shall see, it seems to me that the burden of proof now lies with those who would defend 632."
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #16 - October 15, 2014, 06:06 AM

    I thought "Mohammed the social reformer" was a late twentieth century apologistic idea.  The koran, sira, hadith are just back fill for the new Arab and Persian Empires to pretend they are the same thing, one becoming Sunni, the other Shia.

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #17 - October 15, 2014, 12:50 PM

    I am terribly confused.

    The Dome of the Rock inscriptions from 692 talk about Muhammad coming after Jesus. If he was actually not from Mecca as claimed in the hadith and Qur'an, his real origin would still be known and within living memory, especially if he was alive during the conquest of Palestine. The Umayyad claim that Muhammad came from Mecca would be ridiculed.

    Why would the Umayyads continue Zubayr's Meccan focus when that legitimized their enemy? They hated the man, had him beheaded and crucified. They also kept Jerusalem as the center for prayer and only later was the qibla switched to Mecca.

    It's like the Umayyads were trying to hide the origins of their religion, trying to legitimize it to Christians of the Levant while making it equally attractive to Hijaz Arabs by claiming a Meccan descent. All at the same time.

    It makes my head hurt...
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #18 - October 15, 2014, 01:20 PM

    I am terribly confused.
    ...............

    Quote
    It's like the Umayyads were trying to hide the origins of their religion, trying to legitimize it to Christians of the Levant while making it equally attractive to Hijaz Arabs by claiming a Meccan descent. All at the same time.


    It makes my head hurt...

    Well If it is consolation for you.,  I was also one of  the confused ones on the Origins of Islam shaytan_s .,

    There is little doubt on that All the Islam that came out of that Uthman ibn Affan.,  Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan makes me to question the EXISTENCE OF MUHAMMAD itself..   I am of the opinion The present Muhammad'  story  that we read from hadith and Quran  is a story of Multiple characters  Not one guy... 

    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim
     
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #19 - October 15, 2014, 01:53 PM

    That 2nd fitna wiki article is awful with assertions about someone "welcoming" and giving Karen Armstrong as the key reference!

    Anyone want to sort it - and probably a myriad other articles!

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #20 - October 15, 2014, 04:53 PM

    I am terribly confused.

    The Dome of the Rock inscriptions from 692 talk about Muhammad coming after Jesus. If he was actually not from Mecca as claimed in the hadith and Qur'an, his real origin would still be known and within living memory, especially if he was alive during the conquest of Palestine. The Umayyad claim that Muhammad came from Mecca would be ridiculed.

    Why would the Umayyads continue Zubayr's Meccan focus when that legitimized their enemy? They hated the man, had him beheaded and crucified. They also kept Jerusalem as the center for prayer and only later was the qibla switched to Mecca.

    It's like the Umayyads were trying to hide the origins of their religion, trying to legitimize it to Christians of the Levant while making it equally attractive to Hijaz Arabs by claiming a Meccan descent. All at the same time.

    It makes my head hurt...


    692 is 60 years after Mo's death, and 70 years after the alleged 'hijra.'  To put that in perspective, Jesus died in 33 AD, and the Gospels were written between the 60s and 80s -- i.e., between 30 and 50 years after his death.  Yet we know almost nothing about the life of the historical Jesus, and *literally* nothing about his life prior to its last year, 32-33 AD.  The Gospels are chock full of fiction and fallacy.  This is true even though Jesus's relatives were still all alive and formed part of the early church in Jerusalem (and Paul reports that he even met with them).

    If you go by the *ordinary standards of religious history*, meaning you don't make a special exception for Islam, then the argument that 'people were still alive' imposes almost no constraints on a culture of oral storytelling about a religious founder.  Think of how the sirah expands from cryptic references in the earliest accounts, and then 30 years later you have reports which go into exhaustive detail about what happened -- detail unknown to the earlier accounts.  It was far worse still in the earliest days following Mo's death.  Without clear written contemporaneous documentation that constrains the accounts, nothing gets reported correctly, and fictions proliferate explosively.

    As to what the Umayyads thought about Mo, they weren't a cohesive entity, and only with Abd al Malik do we get a picture of what some of them thought -- but only a very dim outline.  We don't exactly know what Abd al Malik himself thought, apart from the theology inscribed on the Dome of the Rock and in his coinage.  But at that time, in my view, claiming succession to Mohammed as the religious-political quasidivine representative of Allah had become a vital political weapon, and it was at least partially constrained by certain widely prevailing narratives about Mo, as well as to a lesser extent by Qur'anic texts.

    But as to why the Umayyads continued the Meccan narrative (to the extent they did -- it's not exactly attested by any contemporary evidence, I think tolerated it would be a better statement), that's easy.  You had a Hijazi population that had been indoctrinated in a specific narrative.  Al Hajjaj and Abd al Malik, upon crushing the Meccan stronghold, had two choices:  One, to try to reverse the prevailing narrative and relocate it in Damascus or Jerusalem or something.  Two, to simply accept it, but argue that *Abd al Malik* was the only legitimate successor, unifying all the regions together under the religious movement that he now claimed supreme authority over -- that way you turned this religious fervor in your favor, rather than fighting against it.  This is an extremely common, if not default, practice in traditional Middle East conquests.  The conqueror rarely obliterated local religious traditions, but rather argued that he was the fulfillment of them.

    It would seem that Abd al Malik effectively tried to incorporate all of the major prevailing narratives into a new multipolar sacred geography, centered on Jerusalem, Medina, and Mecca, which was subordinate to his caliphal authority.  And this multiplicity is partly why Islam's sacred geography is so confusing and the tradition records a lot of peculiarities and confusions about it.  Rather than making it about Jerusalem/Damascus v. Mecca, the entire thing got sucked up into a confusing morass of legend (such as Mohammed's "night journey" to Jerusalem .... people were just making this stuff up).

    In reality, we know absolutely nothing about Mo's early years, and what Muslim tradition reports has been shown over and over to be just as fictional and contrived as Christian tradition about Jesus's early life.

    Lastly, yes Wikipedia is absolutely awful for Islamic history, but that reflects the fact that Islamic history is still in complete disarray as a discipline.  Which is why Karen Armstrong gets cited as a source.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #21 - October 15, 2014, 05:02 PM

    A few questions that come to mind:

    Are there any historical records of Mecca before the Second Fitna?

    How far does the haj go back? Did it exist in some form before the time of Abd al Malik?

    When did the direction of prayer shift from Jerusalem to Mecca?
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #22 - October 15, 2014, 05:03 PM

    Btw, I have a pet hypothesis that the traditional Islamic dating of Aisha's super early age at marriage and its consumation is a chronological fiction crafted by later Muslims, just as all of the early Islamic chronology is famously artificial.  Why such an early age?  Because it was designed to claim authority for her as a contemporaneous source on claims that were later made about Islamic history.  In other words, with Aisha being so young at her marriage, you had an incredibly 'close source' who could be cited as making accurate reports all the way up to her reported death in 678 CE -- conveniently just two years before Ibn al Zubayr first started printing "Mohammed" coinage.  

    Aisha is also cited as a contested figure authorizing the legitimacy of one or another faction of warring believers from an early date.  Again, this is all incredibly dubious.

    I'd be interested if somebody did an analysis of Aisha's reported chronology in terms of its artificial construction along these lines, but I've never seen it.  Instead the only debate seems to be about pedophilia, which is ironic given that I doubt there is a shred of truth to the traditional Muslim accounts, and they probably served a very different ideological purpose when written down.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #23 - October 15, 2014, 05:09 PM

    A few questions that come to mind:

    Are there any historical records of Mecca before the Second Fitna?

    How far does the haj go back? Did it exist in some form before the time of Abd al Malik?

    When did the direction of prayer shift from Jerusalem to Mecca?


    The records are uniformly terrible and faulty, from what I've seen.  It is very hard to make any reliable claims one way or the other.

    On the other hand, I'm certainly not super knowledgeable on the whole Mecca dispute from an archaeological/historical perspective, as opposed to a "inconsistent with the Qur'an" perspective.  There is a brand-new volume coming out this very month from the Inarah group that appears to be ENTIRELY devoted to ripping on Islam's traditional claims about Mecca .... for 931 pages no less.  Here's the link to the book description, if you can read German.

    http://www.verlag-hans-schiler.de/index.php?title=Markus+Gro%C3%9F+%2F+Karl-Heinz+Ohlig+%3A+Die+Entstehung+einer+Weltreligion+III&art_no=M0418

    I may buy it, although it's relatively expensive.  Unfortunately the link doesn't list the actual essays contained in the book, though some of Kerr's essays from the book are already available on the Interwebz for free.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #24 - October 15, 2014, 05:12 PM

    Thanks - I'll have to rely on your summary of it.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #25 - October 16, 2014, 08:54 AM

    Zaotar, you bring up some good points on the amorphous mess of early Islamic history. Maybe the Muhammad written about on the Dome of the Rock is totally different from the one mentioned in today's hadith. The Islam of the time would have been rather alien to the rigid orthodoxy we have today.

    Maybe the Umayyads never knew the real provenance of Qur'anic teachings and made stuff up to legitimize their rule - using both Christian and Jewish sources aimed at people of the Levant and Zubayr's Meccan narrative for Hijazi Arabs. Two birds, one realpolitik stone.

    60 years is indeed a long time from Muhammad's supposed death to the conquest of Palestine. You're right about Jesus too, it was decades before the Gospels were written and it was only 300 years later that Christianity became the state religion of Rome. By that time, there was a need for a standard text and doctrine but centuries of embellishments would make fable indistinguishable from fact. The same probably happened with Islam, starting out with a base of Syriac Christian liturgy, Jewish messianic fervour and Arab pantheism that ended up being told and retold, embellished a thousand times - like how Herodotus mixed fact with fantastical hearsay in his Histories and nobody later on called him out on it. It's interesting how the bare commandments of the early "Meccan" sura evolved into trippy stuff like the Night Journey.

    I'm wondering if the Sanaa Qur'an represents the earliest codified version and tradition about it being compiled by scribes during Muhammad's lifetime is totally fictitious. The codification could have come during Umayyad rule, when they wanted to use the new religion as a political weapon.

    Finally, what's up with the academic hostility against Crone and Luxenberg? I assume most scholars of Islamic historiography aren't Muslims anyway, so they don't have a stake in defending the faith, yet they refuse to get really critical about Islam's historical foundations.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #26 - October 16, 2014, 02:30 PM

    I think the Hajj commemorates the conquest of Jerusalem by Mohammed, thereby foreshadowing the end of the world.  There is nothing else with the momentous portent of this.

    The switch of direction of mosques occurred with the strange switch probably politically motivated to a small exodus between two grotty desert hovels with filthy water in the middle of a desert.

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #27 - October 16, 2014, 05:05 PM

    My view is that Islam formed via a process remarkably similar to Christianity in terms of the composition and codification of its core narratives.  Almost every objection to the revisionist account of Islam's formation can be answered by simply pointing to Christianity and Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.  The burden of proof lies with those who would argue that Islam is a radical exception to the normal laws of history and religion, and that burden has been failed in my view.

    This is, I think, the biggest difference between the new generation of scholars and the older.  The new generation starts from such a critical perspective, while the old generation starts from accepting the basic Muslim narrative as historical truth and then trying to improve it.  It's akin to how Christianity and Judaism were analyzed 200 years ago, before critical analysis began in the mid 19th century.  For example, the older theological approach would just assume that Abraham was a genuine historical figure as its starting point.  The critical approach would say that it is absolutely crazy to assume the veracity of a text first written 1500 years after the events it purports to report about a religious figure ... so the burden would be to support that extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence, not the other way around.

    Islamic studies has lagged Christian and Judaic studies by well over a century; it is still the backwater of modern scholarship on Abrahamic religions.

    I think you hit the nail on the head by mentioning academic reaction to Crone and Luxenberg.  In fact there was a huge and histrionic outcry against them from the establishment, but (and I emphasize the but) that outcry got beaten down and lost to the point where Crone is arguably the most influential Islamic scholar nowadays.  Luxenberg was initially met with horror and outrage, but he is now relatively mainstream and constantly cited by mainstream scholars (although he is still non-establishment).  Many of his arguments have been accepted, while others have been show to be incorrect. 

    There was really a huge split in the field that emerged as a result of Luxenberg -- the group led by Gabriel Said Reynolds that took Luxenberg seriously and ultimately evolved into IQSA, probably the premiere association for Qur'anic scholars nowadays, and the old-school group led by Neuwirth who tried to suppress and reject Luxenberg's nuclear assault on traditional Qur'anic studies (just as the Germans did previously with Gunter Luling).  But it is IQSA that has stormed to the lead nowadays, and Neuwirth's position is somewhat on its heels.  IQSA has a great website, and are putting on ridiculously awesome conferences.  Check it out if you haven't seen it.

    http://iqsaweb.org/

    Check out the IQSA conference they are putting on next month in San Diego -- this IS the cutting edge of Qur'anic research, including a dizzying array of heavy hitters (including Neuwirth no less, along with Deroche and others).  It's pretty much the event of the year for Qur'anic studies.
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #28 - October 16, 2014, 09:25 PM

    Thanks Zaotar  Afro

    Hi
  • Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts - Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone
     Reply #29 - October 16, 2014, 09:42 PM

    Zaotar
    I looked for videos at iqsaweb.org, but couldn't find any of there or on youtube. Do you know if the next conference will be taped and put online, also do you know if there are similar conferences or debates on youtube or on video online.
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