The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker

      The publication of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s controversial study Hagarism in 1977 unquestionably marks a watershed in the study of religious culture in the early medieval Near East, even if its significance has occasionally been underestimated by other specialists in this field.¹ In particular, this relatively slim volume highlighted the potential importance of non-Islamic literature for knowledge of religious (and secular) history in the seventh and eighth centuries, a so-called dark age for which sources are often sparse and spotty.² Perhaps more importantly, however, this study proposed a radical new model for understanding both the formation of the Islamic tradition and the general religious landscape of the early medieval Near East. Together with the contemporary works of John Wansbrough, Hagarism articulated an innovative reinterpretation of formative Islam as a faith intimately intertwined with the religious traditions of Mediterranean late antiquity and in need of extensive study in the context of this religiously complex and intercultural milieu.³

      There are, it must be admitted, some considerable and undeniable flaws in Hagarism’s reinterpretation of formative Islam, as even its most sympathetic readers have often acknowledged. Most significantly, Hagarism has been rightly criticized for its occasionally uncritical use of non-Islamic sources in reconstructing the origins of Islam.⁴ Wansbrough, for instance, asks rather pointedly of Crone and Cook’s reconstruction: “Can a vocabulary of motives be freely extrapolated from a discrete collection of literary stereotypes composed by alien and mostly hostile observers, and thereupon employed to describe, even interpret, not merely the overt behavior but also the intellectual and spiritual development of helpless and mostly innocent actors?”⁵ Undoubtedly, Wansbrough’s question is intended as rhetorical and meant to impugn the value of non-Islamic sources for understanding earliest Islam. Nonetheless, I think that the most honest and accurate answer to this question is in fact, possibly. While such information perhaps cannot be freely extracted from these sources, when analyzed with some care they may potentially yield historically valuable information concerning the beginnings of Islam

      The imperfections of Hagarism should not lead us to discount completely the important insights that both this study and its approach have to offer.⁶ While some scholars have somewhat unfairly dismissed Hagarism and its approach as either hopelessly colonialist or methodologically flawed,⁷ there is still much to gain from this seminal book. Wansbrough’s more considered rejection of Hagarism reflects his concern for the overwhelming and historically distorting impact of “salvation history,” that is, theologized, sacred history, on both the Islamic and non-Islamic sources, and in light of this he essentially committed himself to an historical agnosticism regarding the origins of Islam.⁸ Yet such resignation is not our only option. Admittedly, both Wansbrough and Robert Hoyland after him have correctly noted that non-Muslim sources alone “cannot provide a complete and coherent account of the history of Early Islam,” as was essentially proposed in Hagarism.⁹ But this recognition does not somehow make non-Islamic witnesses to the religious history of the seventh and eighth centuries any less valuable as a whole than the early Islamic sources, and on particular points they may possibly report more reliably than the Islamic tradition, as this study will argue. Almost all the documentary resources for understanding the formative period of Islam, including even the Qurʾān, are highly problematic from a religious historian’s viewpoint: these sources are frequently overwhelmed and controlled by a master narrative of sacred history, as well as being influenced by the social, political, and theological concerns of the particular groups that produced them. But such conditions do not present an altogether uncommon or impossible circumstance.

      There are ways of extracting historically