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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Patricia Crone. God's Rule: Government and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 462. $39.50.
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| Originally published in the United Kingdom by Edinburgh University Press, the book under review is a North American edition. Its subject is timely, aiming to provide modern readers with detailed background on the origins and permutations of six centuries of medieval Islamic political thought. Patricia Crone is a well-established scholar known previously for controversial yet insightful analyses. |
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Crone's study focuses on Muslim societies in the Middle East from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the Mongol conquest, or the early seventh century through middle thirteenth century. Those centuries witnessed the ministry of Muhammad, Arab Muslim troops conquering the Middle East, assimilation of Byzantine and Sasanian political theories and practices into emerging Muslim polities, secularization of Islamic caliphates and successor states, and schisms dividing Muslim communities located between North Africa and North India. That six-century period also marked the gradual conversion to Islam of most Zoroastrians, numerous Christians, and many Jews—first mainly in urban settings and later in the hinterlands. So, despite wars and regime changes, medieval Muslim writers glorified that time as one when divergent Islamic societies flourished through confluences of distinct mores brought in by newly faithful Muslims from their earlier faiths and communities—a veritable golden age. Crone attempts to decipher and make explicable to readers the many interconnected concerns and solutions that shaped a range of statecraft during that age. |
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The book consists of twenty-two chapters divided into four sections, charts, bibliography, and an index-glossary. At first glance, it seems to promise an intellectual feast for specialists and members of the erudite public as well. Given the volume's scope, only a few matters can be discussed in this review. Crone sets the stage in chapter one with a brief overview of the links perceived by Muslims among divine creation, human governance, religious law, prophecy, and the career of Muhammad. In other words the standard Muslim formulation that religion and state are interconnected through foundation on divine law, and that problems arose from "human disobedience" (p. 14) is rearticulated. Crone views this "fusion" of religious and political spheres by Muslims as distinct from "blurring" of boundaries between faith and state in the Byzantine and Sasanian empires (p. 15). In reaching such a fundamental assumption, which informs much of the rest of the book, Crone projects ideas back from the ninth century onto the earliest Muslims, religiopolitical notions that may not have existed among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century or, even if they did, that were fundamentally reinforced by ones such as the well-established Iranian concept "Church and state were born of one womb, joined together never to be sundered" (Letter of Tosar, 33–34, composed third century, revised sixth century). Moreover, tracing the origins of polity and government back to primordial creation was standard practice in Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian states before Arab Muslims began to do so, and several Middle Eastern religiopolitical traditions even wove the Arab Muslim conquests into their supposed divinely ordained schemes as apocalyptic scenarios where their divinity would eventually correct human errors and reestablish god's rule sans Muslim dominance. |
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