Patricia Crone

Quraysh and the Roman army: Making sense of the Meccan leather trade

This paper argues that the trade in leather and other pastoralist products, which the tradition ascribes to the Meccans, could make sense on the assumption that the goods were destined for the Roman army, which is known to have required colossal quantities of leather and hides for its equipment. The hypothesis that the Meccans were servicing the Roman military is examined and found to be impossible to prove in our current state of knowledge; it is at least compatible with the evidence, however, and also highly promising in terms the light it could throw on the political aspects of the rise of Islam.

The Religion of the Qur’ānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities

This article (in two parts) is devoted to the first step of an attempted reconstruction of the religion of the Qur’ānic musrikūn on the basis of the Qur’ān and indisputably earlier evidence alone. The first part concludes that the musrikūn believed in the same Biblical God as the messenger and that their lesser beings, indiscriminately called gods and angels, functioned much like (dead) saints in later Islam and Christianity. This is not exactly new since it is more or less what Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb concluded three hundred years ago. The second part examines the high God hypothesis and tries to relate the beliefs of the musrikūn to those of other monotheists in late antiquity, with indeterminate results: in terms of their views on God and the lesser beings, the musrikūn could equally well be pagan monotheists and Jews (or Judaisers).

Imperial Trauma: The Case of the Arabs

The symposium theme, “imperial trauma: the powerlessness of the powerful,” has a nice paradoxical ring to it. The obverse would be something like “obedient health: the powerfulness of the powerless,” which sounds equally enticing, but what precisely might it be? It is well known that empires are often weaker than they look in various respects, but that hardly amounts to cases of trauma. The leading essay in the fi rst installment speaks of “practical and ideological traumas” in connection with the constraints and burdens that empires place on their bearers—the costs of empire, in short, but in a sense going far beyond economics.1 This is certainly a subject worth attention, but even here “trauma” seems too strong a word as long as the constraints and burdens are of the type required to keep the empire running. Besides, are they examples of powerlessness? I can only think of one situation in which the expressions “imperial trauma” and “imperial powerlessness” fi t effortlessly together, and that is the one in which empire builders fi nd themselves transformed by their acquisition of empire at such speed that they are conscious of losing their cherished ways, indeed their very selves, yet cannot stop or reverse the process. It is a situation familiar to the Central Asian conquerors of China. Time

Tribes and States in the Middle East

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the most alien aspects of Islamic history is the role played in it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? To seasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is the virtual disappearance of tribes from Europe after the age of invasions that is puzzling: why are there no Hashid and Bakll in Switzerland ? Who could imagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus as places renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Though tribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, they did not play the same role in Chinese and Indian civilisation either as they did in the Muslim Middle East; nor is it obvious that they played the same role in the Middle East before the rise of Islam as they did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then, that Islamicists talk so much about tribes that non-Islamicists often suffer from the misconception that there is nothing but tribes in the Islamic world. Though the misconception is annoying, the tribes deserve the attention, and it is with pleasure that one notes the appearance of a new book on their relationship with states in the Middle East.

Post-Colonialism in Tenth-Century Islam

Abstract Carl-Heinrich Becker, the scholar who is commemorated in these lectures, wrote about the Arabs as colonisers, comparing them with modern colonial powers such as the British, and he would probably have been interested in post-colonialism, too, if he had he lived to see it. In a way you could say that he did live to see it, for the term “post-colonialism” is often taken to refer to the culture of peoples affected by colonial government from the very moment they were conquered, not simply from their recovery of independence. But it was only after the collapse of the colonial empires, in the wake of the Second World War, that the concept of post-colonialism acquired prominence, and Becker died in 1935. Even if he had been familiar with the concept, moreover, the fact that he saw the parallel between the Arab and the modern European empires does not necessarily mean that he would have deemed it appropriate to analyse the result in terms of post-colonialism. The wisdom of applying a concept referring to a modern experience to the tenth-century Muslim world may well strike many readers of this paper as questionable, too.

How did the quranic pagans make a living

This article examines the information given in the Quran, as distinct from the exegetical tradition, on the livelihoods pursued by the mushriku¯n to whom the Messenger was preaching. It finds them to be uniformly described as agriculturalists and seafarers. The purpose of their maritime activity is not usually specified, but on one occasion it is said to be for fishing. The believers, too, are agriculturalists in some passages, but they are more commonly described as traders. There is a wealth of passages depicting them as such, and preaching to them in commercial imagery, in the suras classified by the tradition as Medinese.

The Use and Abuse of Evidence: The Question of Provincial and Roman Influences on Early Islamic Law@@@Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate

Preface 1. The state of the field 2. A practical guide to the study of Islamic law 3. The Islamic patronate 4. The case against Arabia 5. The case against the non-Roman Near East: paramone 6. The case for the Roman Near East 7. Conclusion Appendices Notes Index.

The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (review)

those who remember their parents’ histories? Locher-Scholten’s monograph provides only the views of elite literate Javanese. Scholars of Africa and Latin America have demonstrated that oral testimony can yield rich accounts of individuals whose voices are left out of written documents. What were the visions of the illiterate rural masses for which Indonesian elites claimed to speak? Despite this weakness, Locher-Scholten’s text remains a valuable contribution to scholars of colonial and gender studies. Moreover, her use of discourse analysis with archival research remains a signiacant effort.