Part 5 - Appendix 3
Hagarism, by Crone and Cook
The Book:
"Hagarism . . . is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a 'leg pull', 'spoof'."
R. B. Sergeant, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society.
"It is difficult to imagine that this book is not intended to shock, and partly even intended to do so."
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"The book appears to be deliberately provocative."
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
"One feels battered by the style, as if by an hour or two in noisy traffic."
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
The Approach:
"This is the argument: if the existence of the Koran is not attested by 'hard evidence' till the end of the seventh century, or attested in its historical context before the middle of the eighth, 'the historicity of the Islamic tradition is in some degree problematic', and there are no 'cogent internal grounds for rejecting it' or cogent external grounds for accepting it' . . . The Islamic sources are not able to 'arbitrate' between these two different approaches and 'the only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again'. That is, two approaches are equally feeble, and therefore the only way is to adopt one of them; if it is the 'only way', why is it 'not unreasonable to proceed in the usual fashion', that is do just the opposite?"
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
The Sources:
"Given the authors profess to be Islamic Historians, they are sadly out of touch with contemporary research on Islam and their aspersions on early Islamic sources are characterized by a false confidence engendered by a superficial scanning of Western criticism of hadith. Why should the Syriac sources, not new of course to Islamic historians, be considered more trustworthy than the Arab historians?
Relying on 'contemporary non-Muslim sources to reconstruct a phase in the history of the religion 'Hajarism' which the Islamic tradition has itself suppressed' [sic[, the authors have invented 'Hajarenes'. If those historians dub the Arabian Muslims 'Ishmaelites' or 'Hajarites', this is surely a disparaging allusion to the traditional descent of their Arab conquerors from the bondwoman Hajar? The Hebrew name means 'stranger', parallel to the Arabic dhakil, one who has taken refuge with others. Hijrah means neither 'exodus' nor Warnsborough's 'exile'. The Islamic muhajirun are incontrovertibly 'emigrants' seeking the protection of others. As a 'phase in the history of the religion' [sic] 'Hajarism' exists only in the authors' imagination and misinterpretation of texts."
R. B. Sergeant, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society.
" . . . The juxtaposition muhajir: Hagar, even if it were etymologically sound, cannot really support the messianic and irredentist superstructure erected here to explain the Arab expansion into the Fertile Crescent. The material is upon occasion misleadingly presented, e.g. Ephrem certainly did not prophesy an exodus of Hagarenes from the desert (p.13), nor did Levond report Leo's description of Hajjaj destroying old Hagarene writings (p.18)."
Wansbrough, BSOAS, Vol. XLI, pp.155-156: 1978.
"It is easier to believe that Muslims are better witnesses to Islam than Christian or Jewish who may more naturally be supposed to have known very little about it. Even after living among Muslims for a millennium they often knew very little; and they do not make more acceptable witnesses for the earliest days. But the authors are happy to take evidence from Christians and Jews in the eighth century, though without explaining why this now becomes acceptable evidence for 'religious events in the seventh century'".
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"A second methodological problem is the deliberate reduction of the available sources. The authors proceed from contemporary non-Muslim (Christian and Jewish) reports and leave aside the entire Muslim tradition itself . . . But we should not forget that these texts, though contemporary, only show how the new phenomenon was seen, not how it actually was. If we agree that Islam, at this early stage, was still trying to define its 'identity' then we cannot demand that an observer from outside who could even less evaluate the radical novelty of the event should have a clearer concept of what was really happening. We should rather expect that he tried to describe the phenomenon with his own categories-which would have been messianism; in the case of a Palestinian Jew. And the fact that he mixed up or ignored important details ceases to be suprising when we compare the kind of knowledge people of our well-informed age may have of Arabia or Islam."
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
More Responses:
"Enemies of this methodology must inevitably say that it consists in . . . magnifying points of evidence in proportion as they conform to an arbitrary theory; and above all in treating anything as definitely having happened, once it has been suggested that it might have."
"If a tentative hypothesis quickly becomes fixed as a fact, it may need unfixing again, as with the invasion of Palestine in the Prophet's lifetime, which had ultimately to be reconciled with the facts as accepted later. There was 'a chronological revision by which he died two years before the invasion began' - a chronological reversal, of course, of the authors' chronological revision."
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"Islamic evidence is apparently admissible when it may be interpreted as unintentionally revealing truths hidden hitherto."
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"The first characteristic of the method is the rejection of Islamic evidence, except when it suits . . . The weakness of the method is that the actual evidence used, even if it were true, is not evaluated; nor is more than a cursory attempt made to evaluate the Islamic evidence which was discounted in advance - apart from eighth-century evidence when convenient."
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"One learns with astonishment that 'there is some reason to suppose that the Koran was put together out a plurality of early Hagarene religious works', and that 'the Islamic imamate is a Samaritan calque'. Have these young authors ever read the Qur'an attentively, or, in their more modest way, are they seeking the fame won by the ingenious Hebraist who associated Jesus Christ with the mushroom?"
R. B. Sergeant, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society.
" . . . there remains the basic question whether the early Muslims can really be viewed, in their attitude towards the Koran, as editors patching fragments together and whether they were not rather believers who recited the Koran in their liturgy; 'Qur'an' after all means 'recitation'."
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
"When they speak of 'the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions' they are begging the question of where this plurality came from. A lot of revelations? A lot of prophets? One fact that needs to be taken into account with other facts is that the Koran has given profound satisfaction to millions of people over fourteen centuries. Are we to fall back on the notion that just anyone could have written any of it?"
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
"Unsurprisingly, the Crone-Cook interpretation has failed to win general acceptance among Western Orientalists, let alone Muslim scholars . . . The rhetoric of these authors may be an obstacle for many readers, for their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies. More substantively, their use (or abuse) of the Greek and Syriac sources has been sharply criticised. In the end, perhaps we ought to use Hagarism more as a 'what-if' exercise than as a research monograph."
R. S. Humphreys, Islamic History - Revised Edition, p.85. Princeton University Press: 1995
"The reconstructable past as presented in Hagarism relies only on sources outside of Islam, and constructs a view of a past so as odds with conventional views that it has been almost universally rejected. This has been particularly so because the authors' criticisms of the possibilities of understanding the earliest periods of Islam would seem, if applied as a general method to the sources used by historians of religion, to lead toward a kind of historical solipsism."
Gordon Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia, p.110. University of Carolina Press: 1988
"The 'Haggerenes' are treated as empty shells which had to be filled with foreign ideas in order to acquire an 'identity'. They were bedouins who had no 'answers to the problems of settled life' . . . The authors do not mention the fact that Arab tribes were already living in Syria and Iraq in pre-Islamic times, and not simply as bedouins. The Ghassanids and the Lakhmids are hardly incorporated into the picture, the Yemen not at all."
"According to the authors, the 'Hagarenes' were first influenced in Syria and only afterwards exposed to 'the more integral traditions in Iraq', but we are not informed how this move from Syria and Iraq were conquered at the same time and developed a Muslim civilization concurrently"
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
"If we work with the hypothesis of an intentional 'editing' of the past on the scale assumed by the authors we would have to presuppose not one forger, but a host of them, and not only one in Syria, where AbdulMalik could have 'manipulated' the process, but also in Iraq and in the Hijaz. Not only a historical tradition would have been invented, but also much poetry showing the impact of the religion (cf Doctoral thesis of Omar A.Farrukh 1937 obviously unknown to the authors). In this respect, the situation is different from that in early Christianity; we are not dealing with a few isolated gospels."
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
" . . . a refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it (the hypothesis of the book) in detail . . . Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous."
Joseph Van Ess, The Making of Islam.
An Old Approach:
"We can detect a similar structural approach to this same subject in the 'Agarenism' of mediaeval writers about the origins of Islam. In the Middle Ages, the word Saracenus, wrongly supposed to derive from the Vulgate Latin form of the name Sara, in order to deny descent from Hagar and Ismail, was believed to be used by the Arabs themselves, and mediaeval authors had a simple kind of 'Hagarism' to rebut this; they often preferred to use Aragenus and Ismailitus.
The two groups seem to have been alike in a low opinion of the Arabs of the Jahilliyah, but the mediaevals were more particular - 'rough, uneducated, simple men', 'brutish people', 'rough wandering men' - and, close to the Crone and Cook judgement 'religiously parvenu', is 'uneducated people who had never seen a prophet'.
In the modern example, the authors are asking us to throw out the Islamic sources and try again with what residue remains; in the Middle Ages, apocryphal legends (as we have hitherto thought them) were gradually extruded by more authentically Islamic material. The astonishing ability of mediaeval writers to bend Muslim sources to support ancient Christian libels is nearly equalled by the ingenuity of our present authors in creating this new overall pattern of Toynbee-like shapes.
Congruity (or suitability) and credibility, are criterion to the two schools of thought: congruity with a point of view chosen in advance, credibility judged from the same view.
The authors' acceptance of the sparse evidence for the conquest of Palestine in the Prophet's lifetime is based on little more than credibility, and credibility on assumptions unacceptable to scholars accustomed to different criteria. Phrases like 'it does make sense' mean 'one can make patterns, and one is free to choose the prettiest one can make.'
Both groups are culturally intolerant at worst and patronising at best . . . "
N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies.
Last Words:
"After plodding through this tiresome travesty of history one finds on the dust-cover the authors' self assured assertion, 'This challenging book will be of interest to all those concerned with the study of Islamic history and civilisation . . . It is also a major contribution to the history of religion and history of ideas.' Scholars of mark - Lyall, Browne, Nicholson, Arberry - have published with the Cambridge Press. The more the pity that it has been so ill advised as to be 'conned' into giving its imprimatur to this pretentious humbug."
R. B. Sergeant, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society.