Name Patricia Crone Role Author | Education University of London | |
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Main interests Major works Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (with M.A. Cook); Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam People also search for Martin Hinds, Gerhard Bowering, Jere L. Bacharach, Lawrence Conrad, Salim ibn Dhakwan Books Hagarism, Meccan Trade and the Rise, The Nativist Prophets, Slaves on Horses, Medieval Islamic Political T | ||
The acculturated native who rebels patricia crone
Patricia Crone (March 28, 1945 – July 11, 2015) was a Danish-American author, Orientalist, and historian, specializing in early Islamic history.
Contents
- The acculturated native who rebels patricia crone
- Remembering patricia crone 1945 2015
- Life and career
- Research
- References
Crone's lasting contribution to the field of Islamic studies is the fundamental questioning of the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam, by which she significantly contributed as a major representative of the "Revisionist School" to a paradigm shift in Islamic Studies among the Western Orientalists.
Remembering patricia crone 1945 2015
Life and career
Crone was born in Kyndeløse, Roskilde, Denmark, on March 28, 1945. After taking the forprøve, or preliminary exam, at Copenhagen University, she went to Paris to learn French, and then to London where she determined to get into a university to become fluent in English. In 1974 she earned her PhD at the University of London, where she was 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. In 1977, Crone became a University Lecturer in Islamic history and a Fellow of Jesus College at Oxford University. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University in 1990 and held several positions at Cambridge. She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992 to 1994, and as Reader in Islamic history from 1994-97. In 1997, she was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she was named as Andrew W. Mellon Professor. From 2002 until her death in 2015, she was a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Social Evolution & History.
She died on July 11, 2015, aged 70, from cancer.
Research
The major theme of Crone's scholarly life was the fundamental questioning of the historicity of Islamic sources about the beginnings of Islam. Crone's two most known works concentrate on this topic: Hagarism and Meccan Trade. Three decades after Hagarism, Fred Donner called Patricia Crone's work a "milestone" in the field of Orientalist study of Islam.
In their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Crone and her associate Michael Cook, working at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London at the time, 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 the 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 witnesses, they reconstructed a significantly different story of Islam's beginnings, compared with the story known from the 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. Later, Patricia Crone refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings. Yet she continued to maintain the basic results of her work:
In her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), Crone argued that the importance of the pre-Islamic Meccan trade had been grossly exaggerated. Furthermore, she found that Mecca was never part of any of the major ancient trade routes. She also suggested that while Muhammad never traveled much beyond the Hijaz, internal evidence in the Qur'an, such as its description of Muhammad's opponents as "olive growers", might indicate that the events surrounding the Prophet took place near the Mediterranean region, and not in Mecca. However, Abdullah al-Andalusi notes that although Makkah is a ‘dry valley’, the Hijaz region was well-supplied with springs and oases, including that of Madinah.
Beginning as a scholar of early military and economic history of the 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".