Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World is a 1977 book about the early history of Islam 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, Crone and Cook depict an early Islam very different from the traditionally-accepted version derived from Muslim historical accounts. According to the authors, "Hagarenes" was a term which near-contemporary sources used to name an Arab movement of the 7th century CE whose conquests and resultant caliphate were inspired by Jewish messianism. Crone and Cook contend that an alliance of Arabs and Jews sought to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantine Empire, that the Qur'an consists of 8th-century edits of various Judeo-Christian and other Middle-Eastern sources, and that Muhammad was the herald of Umar "the redeemer", a Judaic messiah. Although the hypotheses proposed in Hagarism have been criticized, even by the authors themselves, the book has been hailed as a seminal work in its branch of Islamic historiography. The book questioned prevailing assumptions about traditional sources, proposing new interpretations that opened avenues for research and discussion. It connected the history of early Islam to other areas, from Mediterranean late antiquity to theories of acculturation. Following earlier critical work by Goldziher, Schacht, and Wansbrough, it challenged scholars to use a much wider methodology, including techniques already used in biblical studies. It is thus credited for provoking a major development of the field, even though it might be viewed more as a "what-if" experiment than as a research monograph. Synopsis Cook and Crone postulate that "Hagarism" started as a "Jewish messianic movement" to "reestablish Judaism" in the Jewish Holyland (Palestine), that its adherents were first known as muhajirun rather than Muslims, and that their hijra (migration) was to Jerusalem rather than Medina. Its members were initially both Jewish and Arab but the Arabs' increasing success impelled them to break from the Jews around the time of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in the late seventh century. They flirted with Christianity, learning a respect for Jesus as prophet and Mary as Virgin, before asserting an independent Abrahamic monotheist identity.