Patricia Crone

Patricia Crone (March 28, 1945July 11, 2015) was a Danish historian specializing in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.

Early life, family and education

Crone was born in Kyndeløse Sydmark (south of Kyndeløse) 23 km northwest of Roskilde in Roskilde County, Denmark, on March 28, 1945.

After taking the ''forprøve'' (preliminary exam) at University of Copenhagen, she went to Paris to learn French, and then to London where she was determined to get into a university to become fluent in English. In 1974, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London with a thesis titled "The Mawali in the Umayyad period". She was then a senior research fellow at the Warburg Institute until 1977. She was accepted as an occasional student at King's College London and followed a course in medieval European history, especially church-state relations.

Career

In 1977, Crone became a University Lecturer in Islamic history and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and fellow of Gonville and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1990 and held several positions at Cambridge.; "Dr. Crone, who is presently at Cambridge University, will be in residence at the Institute as of the beginning of the fall term in September 1997". She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992 to 1994, and as Reader in Islamic history from 1994 to 1997.

In 1997, she was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she was named as Andrew W. Mellon Professor. In 2001, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. From 2002 until her death in 2015, she was a member of the Editorial Board of the journal ''Social Evolution & History''.

Death

In November 2011, Crone was diagnosed with lung cancer, that had already spread to the brain. She died on July 11, 2015, aged 70, from said cancer.

Research

The major theme of Patricia Crone's scholarly life was the fundamental questioning of the historicity of Islamic sources which concern the beginnings of Islam. Her two best-known works concentrate on this topic: ''Hagarism'' and ''Meccan Trade''. Three decades after ''Hagarism'', Fred Donner called Crone's work a "milestone" in the field of Orientalist study of Islam.

Though she began as a scholar of broader military and economic history of the Near and Middle East, Crone's later career focused mainly on "the Qur'an and the cultural and religious traditions of Iraq, Iran, and the formerly Iranian part of Central Asia".

Hagarism

In their book ''Hagarism'' (1977), Crone and her associate Michael Cook, both then working at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, provided a new analysis of early Islamic history. They fundamentally questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam. They tried to produce a picture of Islam's beginnings only from non-Arabic sources. By studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, which were written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac by actual witnesses, they reconstructed a story of Islam's beginnings that differs from the story told by Islamic traditions. Crone and Cook claimed to be able to explain exactly how Islam came into being by the fusion of various Near Eastern civilizations under Arabic leadership.

Fred M. Donner viewed the book as a "wake-up call": despite initial repudiation, it set a milestone by pointing out that scholars need to "consider a much more varied body of source material than most were used to using, or trained to use." On the other hand, he criticized the book's indiscriminate use of non-Muslim sources and the "labyrinthine" arguments incomprehensible even to many who had strong specialist training.

Oleg Grabar described ''Hagarism'' as a "brilliant, fascinating, original, arrogant, highly debatable book" and writes that "the authors' fascination with lapidary formulas led them to cheap statements or to statements which require unusual intellectual gymnastics to comprehend and which become useless, at best cute" and that "... the whole construction proposed by the authors lacks entirely in truly historical foundations" while also praising the authors for trying to "relate the Muslim phenomenon to broad theories of acculturation and historical change."

Robert Bertram Serjeant wrote 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'."

Michael G. Morony

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