Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts:
Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone

Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein,
and Robert Hoyland, eds.

Leiden: Brill, 2015. 631 pages.

This book is an important addition to the by-now rich collection of edited vol-
umes and monographs published by Brill under the heading “Islamic History
and Civilization: Studies and Texts.” It contains twenty-two essays written by
leading scholars, historians, and philologists in honor of their late colleague

110 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3



and teacher Patricia Crone (professor of Islamic history, Institute for Advanced
Study), who passed away a few months after the publication of the volume.
For students of Islam, Crone needs no introduction. Her scholarship has
marked the field through its erudition as well as its distinctive boldness and
controversial nature that, at times, drew virulent criticism. Perceived by some
as arrogant and hasty, by others as incisive and daring, she was not one to
mince words. This volume, starting with an intimate “memoir” by Judith Her-
rin and concluding with an appreciative scholarly review by Chase Robinson,
tends to overlook Crone’s divisive personality and does much to present her
as an ideal academic and mentor. She was, as the editors lyrically phrase it, a
“seeker and lover of truth.” 

Although the volume is not thematically organized, most of the contribu-
tions deal with law, politics, and identity, which were Crone’s primary research
interests. They frequently engage topics addressed in passing in Crone’s own
work, notably Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Ed-
inburgh University Press, 2004), and The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic
Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). However, the meticu-
lousness of the historical research and the methodological difficulties in the
field often allow only for inconclusive results. 

In view of the wider debate on the sources of the Shari‘ah, G. Hawting
and D. M. Eisenberg seek to complicate the origins of non-refundable advance
payment (“earnest money”) by providing a comparative study of the practice
in Islamic and Jewish laws. P. Pavlovitch and D. S. Powers, in a collaborative
work that will be of particular interest to students of hadith, endeavor to date
a specific prophetic saying related to inheritance guidelines. In doing so, they
rely on the well-established isnād-cum-matn approach, but also pay attention
to datable elements from the transmission (matn) itself in an effort to recon-
struct the different layers of its composition. C. Melchert suggests, against
Crone, the centrality of Kufa and Basra in early Islamic legal controversies,
as reflected in Ibn Abi Shayba’s Muṣannaf. K. Bauer offers a social historical
approach to tafsīr by studying how the formulation of marriage contracts
might have been influenced by an exegetical gloss to Q. 2:228 attributed to
al-Dahhak. She explores, in particular, the origin of the formula ḥuṣn al-
ṣubḥah (good companionship) that qualifies the husband-wife relationship in
many medieval marriage contracts and considers to what extent it departs
from the jurists’ analogy of marriage to ownership.

On politics, D. Tor provides an illustration to the case made by Crone
and Hind in God’s Caliph (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Book Reviews 111



that the caliph’s religious authority gradually waned under the pressure of
an emerging class of religious scholars by looking at the figure of al-Fudayl
b. ‘Iyad and his relationship to Harun al-Rashid. M. Gordon turns his atten-
tion to Abbasid intra-imperial power relations and ponders on why Ibn
Tulun, the powerful governor of Egypt, remained loyal to the central au-
thority in Bagdad. C. Wickham engages in a cross-cultural exploration of
memory construction by administrators in Byzantium, the Islamic caliphate,
and China. Looking at the Nishwār al-Muḥāḍarah, a tenth-century adab
work addressed to the secretarial class, Wickham remarks that military
events, which typically center on rulers and their might, are conspicuously
absent from Muslim public memory, thus highlighting once more the Ab-
basid caliphs’ declining authority.

Six contributions grapple with questions of identity in Islamic history, ad-
dressing wide-ranging issues through a reflexive engagement with the cate-
gories used by historians to make sense of the past. M. Mavroudi calls for a
re-examination of the triangular relationship between Ancient Greek, Byzan-
tine, and Arab civilizations. Debunking the clearly loaded question of who
“saved” the Greek heritage, she makes a case for the persistence of classical
Greek education in both Byzantium and Arab-administered lands to conclude
that “nobody ‘saved’ them single-handedly” (p. 327). Addressing the thorny
issue of the relationship between early Islam and the previous two Biblical
religions, G. Stroumsa provides an overview of the different – and so far in-
conclusive – attempts to contextualize the emergence of Islam within a pre-
dominantly Jewish or Christian context. While the case Stroumsa makes for
a “Jewish Christian” milieu remains tentative, this contribution, penned by a
leading scholar of Jewish and Christian thought in Late Antiquity, represents
a welcome transdisciplinary perspective on a question that continues to pre-
occupy the field. 

Two articles focus on the Andalusian experience. D. Wasserstein follows
four generations of one particular Jewish family, that of Yehoseph Ibn al-
Naghrila, the vizier of Granada’s ruler, and the pretext for public discontent
that led to the 1066 Granada massacre. Through biographic historiography,
Wasserstein intends to highlight the ambiguity of Jewish prosperity in Mus-
lim lands, for while Judaism thrived under Islam and was, in his view, liter-
ally “saved” by the coming of the new religion (p. 526), Jews, unlike
Christians, remained vulnerable precisely because they had the means of
maintaining a distinct identity. D. Abulafia, emphasizing the stakes involved
in the modern myth of the Andalusian “convivencia,” calls for a dispassion-
ate examination of the different experiences of Jews, Christians, and Mus-

112 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3



lims living in medieval Spain under Muslim or Christian rule. His panoramic
treatment of the topic reads as a useful; however, this quick introduction
leaves one wishing for more.

Two more contributions examine the ethnic plurality that characterized
the Abbasid world. M. Cooperson draws attention to the historical contingency
of identity, an issue that became painfully evident to the Arab minority when
language, religion, and culture failed to serve as straightforward cues for de-
termining ethnicity. The blurring of ethnic identities resulted in Arab distress
but also encouraged creative responses, as can be seen in al-Mas‘udi’s (896-
956) universal history. M. Larkin provides a second case-study of identity re-
formulation in the eastern Islamic lands through the figure of al-Mutannabi
(915-65). As a proud Arab poet who wrote eulogies for the Persianate Buyids,
he found himself embedded in complex personal and collective cultural ne-
gotiations. Larkin argues that it might have been partially for that reason that
his poetry is markedly innovative.

Another set of articles can be described as belonging to the history of
ideas. K. Van Bladel traces the ways through which Indian science, particularly
astronomy, reached the Abbasid court of al-Mansur (r. 754-75). The journey
was surprisingly indirect, with the Chinese Tang dynasty (618-907) playing a
central role. Kh. El-Rouayheb addresses a fascinating offshoot of the Ash‘ari
doctrine of theological voluntarism. If God is not bound by human under-
standings of right and wrong and acts are ethical only insofar as they respect
the divine commands and prohibitions, does God have to tell the truth? El-
Rouayheb reviews how prominent medieval thinkers addressed this philo-
sophical problem. Also in the field of theology, F. Zimmermann exposes the
similarities between early kalām rhetorical strategies and Greek dilemmatic
arguments in which opponents are cornered through a series of closed ques-
tions. He argues that early Muslim theologians naturally came to rely upon
what must have been a living tradition of Greco-Syriac disputation.

Reflecting Crone’s commitment to a close reading of primary sources, a
number of articles translate and analyze little-known manuscripts. R. Hoyland
examines two brief letters that document Muslim-Christian relationships in the
early Umayyad period. Dated to the 680s and conserved on a papyrus found
in Nessana (the Negev desert), the letters convey an unequivocal rebuke from
a regional authority to local administrators who wronged the native Christian
population, probably in regards to tax collection. The sender of the letters re-
minds the local officials of “the protection of God and the protection of his
messenger” (“dhimmat allah wa dhimmat al-rasūl”) granted to the inhabitants.
Such an expression contrasts with the significantly less binding “dhimma of

Book Reviews 113



you and your fathers” that was later accorded to Christians and Jews in ex-
change for paying the jizyah. On this basis, Hoyland suggests that the rights of
non-Muslims under Arab administration were initially more strongly upheld
than they came to be within a few decades of the conquest. 

D. Stewart translates and analyzes an eleventh-century Shi‘i commentary
on Q. 9:122 that addresses the role of jurists in relation to the Occulted Imam.
A. Silverstein discusses a little-known Samaritan version of the Biblical Book
of Esther composed in the fourteenth century. Tracing the author’s sources
and attempting to determine his aims, Silverstein sheds some light on the bitter
Jewish-Samaritan rivalry. B. T. Krieger edits, translates, and discusses a
Nusayri manual written in Syria in 1889 that promotes practices such as wife-
sharing and orgiastic nights. Krieger believes it is genuine, but concedes that
more research is needed to fully apprehend its significance.

Last but not least, J. Witztum’s article stands on its own. It is a careful
study of two sets of parallel narratives in the Qur’an that recall the fall of
Adam on one hand, and the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf on the other.
Witztum breaks new ground in charting the plausible evolution of these stories
in the Qur’an by paying special attention to the divergences between the dif-
ferent accounts and by stressing the need to address the sūrah as a literary
unity. Moreover, his well-argued call for a more sustained engagement with
scholarship produced in Muslim lands is worthy of note. Indeed, it offers – in
the eyes of this reviewer at least – a more promising response to some chal-
lenges facing Islamic studies than Chase Robinson’s attempt to re-cast Patricia
Crone as a post-Orientalist pioneer. 

Robinson’s provocative “Crone and the End of Orientalism,” which closes
the volume, is founded on a surprisingly restrictive understanding of Orien-
talism as an institution whose essential shortcomings were “self-serving con-
sensus” and “disciplinary inertia.” In his view, Crone’s achievement was to
provoke “stimulating controversy” and open up the field to exciting new ideas
and hypotheses. Although Crone undoubtedly did much to liberate the field
from its intellectual conservatism, she contributed little to problematize an-
other kind of insularity, that of western-based scholars discussing eastern sub-
jects. The political dimensions that inevitably accompany Occidental
discourses on Islam are certainly not ignored by Robinson. He recognizes that
the “stakes are high” and that “[i]n some respects, these are the best and worst
of times for Islamic studies” (p. 611). However, the attitude he suggests that
scholars adopt, following Crone’s example, to transcend that insularity is dis-
concertingly unilateral: “For the scholar, what better way to reduce the ‘ten-
sion’ between ‘historian and believer’ than to highlight the constructed and

114 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3



contingent nature of orthodoxy in general and the Sunni synthesis in particu-
lar?” (pp. 613-14). That Robinson does not deem it necessary to further scru-
tinize such an understanding of the scholar’s mission would indicate that a
certain kind of “Orientalism” definitely lives on.

Emmanuelle Stefanidis
Doctoral Student, Department of Arabic Studies 

Sorbonne University-Paris IV, Paris, France

Book Reviews 115