The Journal of Middle East Medievalists has moved online:
http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/al-usur-al-wusta/current-issue/ The current issue includes a tribute to Patricia Crone:
http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2015/11/UW-23-Crone.pdfAs well as these recollections by Patricia Crone herself:
http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2015/11/UW-23-MEM-Award-Crone.pdf....
One summer towards the end of my time at school, one of my sisters and I went to the theatre festival at Avignon, and there for the first time in my life, I met a live Muslim, a Moroccan. I had decided to study the Muslim world without ever knowingly having set eyes on an Arab or Persian or heard Arabic or Persian spoken. There weren’t any of them in Denmark back then: it was Gilgamesh who had seduced me. I discovered him in my teens and wanted to be an ancient Near Eastern archaeologist, but for a variety of reasons I became an Islamicist instead. Anyway, I met this Moroccan in Avignon, and he told me the story of the Battle of Siffin: the Syrians were losing and responded by hoisting Qurans on their lances, the battle stopped, and so Ali lost. It never occurred to me to believe it; I smiled politely and thought to myself, “when I get to university I’ll hear a different story.” I got to Copenhagen University, but no Islamic history was taught there, only Semitic philology, which I did not want to do, and history, meaning European history, which I did do and enjoyed, but which was not where I wanted to stay. Eventually I got myself to England, and there I was accepted by SOAS and heard Professor Lewis lecture on early Islamic history, including the Battle of Siffin. He told the story exactly as my Moroccan friend had told it. I could not believe it. It struck me as obvious that the narrative was fiction, and besides, everyone knows that battle accounts are most unlikely to be reliable, least of all when they are told by the loser. I thought about it again many years later, in 2003, when one of Saddam Hussain’s generals, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, also known as comical (not chemical) Ali, persistently asserted that the Iraqis had defeated the Americans and put them to flight, so that there weren’t any American troops in Iraq any more. At the very least one would have expected Lewis to say something about the problematic nature of battle narratives, and was this really true? But no: it was a truth universally acknowledged that, during the Battle of Siffin, the Syrians hoisted Qurans on their lances and thereby stopped the battle, depriving the Iraqis of their victory.
I think this is the biggest academic shock I’ve ever suffered, but I didn’t say anything. I never did, I was too shy. And then I encountered John Wansbrough. He read Arabic texts with us undergraduates, clearly thinking we were a hopeless lot, but he was the first person I met at SOAS who doubted the Siffin story. As it turned out, he doubted just about everything in the tradition. I was fascinated by him. I wanted to know how he thought we should go about writing about early Islamic history, so I continued reading texts with him as a graduate, but I never got an answer. Once, when we were reading Tabari’s account of Ibn al-Ashʿath’s revolt in the mid-Umayyad period, Wansbrough asked: “what year are we in?” I thought he simply meant “what year has Tabari put this in?,” but when I replied year 82,” or whatever, he acidly retorted, “I see you have the confidence of your supervisor,” meaning Bernard Lewis, my supervisor, whom he deeply disliked. I think his question was meant to be understood as, “Is all this really something that happened in year 82 (or whenever) or is it stereotyped battle scenes interspersed with poetry that could be put in any heroic account in need of amplification?” I don’t know, for he did not explain. He never did. He was an imam samit
From all this you can see two things. First, it was not exposure to Wansbrough that made me a sceptic or radical or whatever else they like to call me. I was a sceptic already in Avignon, years before I came to England, without being aware of it. In my own understanding I was just thinking commonsense. And secondly, Islamic history was not studied at an advanced level. I don’t know how the Battle of Siffin is taught these days, but I cannot imagine it is done with the credulity of those days and, at least in England, Lewis must take part of the credit for this, for he was very keen for Islamicists to become historians.
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Topic: Qur'anic studies today