Patricia Crone

Patricia Crone, Ph.D., (born 1945,^[1] Denmark) is a scholar, author, Orientalist, and historian of early Islamic history working at the Institute for Advanced Study. She established herself as a major challenger to the established narrative of the early history of Islam.^[2]

Career

Patricia Crone completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of London, receiving a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1973 under Bernard Lewis.^{[citation needed]} For the next three years, she served as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. In 1977, she became a University Lecturer in Islamic history and a Fellow of Jesus College at Oxford University. Dr. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University in 1990, and has held several positions at Cambridge since then.^{[citation needed]} She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992-94, and Reader in Islamic history from 1994 until her appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she became Andrew W. Mellon professor in 1997. Since 2002, she has been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Social Evolution & History.^{[citation needed]}

In their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Crone and her associate Michael Cook, working at SOAS at the time, provided an analysis of early Islamic history by looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses. They claimed that Islam, as represented by contemporary, Non-Muslim sources, was in essence a tribal rebellion against the Byzantine and Persian empires with deep roots in Judaism, and that Arabs and Jews were allies in these conquering communities.^[3]

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^[4] and criticised for its "use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources"^[5] The controversial thesis of Hagarism is not widely accepted.^[6]

• Josef van Ess argued that "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."^[4]

• R. B. Serjeant informs us that "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’, pure ’spoof’."^[7]

• David Waines, Professor of Islamic Studies Lancaster University states: "The Crone-Cook theory has been almost universally rejected. The evidence offered by the authors is far too tentative and conjectural (and possibly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish were as intimate as they would wish them to have been."^[8]

In her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Crone argues that the importance of the pre-Islamic Meccan trade has been grossly exaggerated. She also suggests that while Muhammad never traveled much beyond the Hijaz, internal evidence in the Qur'an such as its description of Muhammad's polytheist opponents as olive growers, might indicate that the events surrounding the prophet took place near to the Mediterranean milieu.^[3]

Bibliography

Sole author

• Slaves on Horses : The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980) ISBN 0-521-52940-9
• Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) ISBN 1-59333-102-9
• Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law : The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (1987 Paperback:2002) ISBN 0-521-52949-2
• Pre-Industrial Societies : Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (2003) ISBN 1-85168-311-9
• God's Rule : Government and Islam. Six centuries of medieval islamic political thought (2004). Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-13290-5. Also ISBN 0-231-13291-3.
• Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2005). Edinburgh University Press, New Ed edition. ISBN 0-7486-2194-6
• From Arabian tribes to Islamic empire : army, state and society in the Near East c.600-850 (2008) ISBN 978-0-7546-5925-9

Coauthor

• with M.A. Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, (1977) ISBN 0-521-29754-0
• with Martin Hinds, God's Caliph : Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (2003; orig. 1986) ISBN 0-521-54111-5

Articles

• 'What do we actually know about Mohammed?'
• '"Jihad": idea and history,'

References

External links

• Institute for Advanced Study: Faculty and Emeriti: Crone — homepage in Princeton.
• Book God's Rule book review
• Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam section beginning at page 231