The Islamic Scholarly Tradition

This collection comprises fourteen papers delivered at a December 2010 conference held at Princeton University in honor of Michael A. Cook, as well as a preface and an introduction. Its four sections are designed to reflect the prin- cipal areas of Near Eastern and Islamic studies to which Cook has contributed: “Early Islamic History,” “Early Modern and Modern Islamic History,” “Juridical and Intellectual History,” and “Reinterpretations and Transformations.” The papers cover a broad geographic range from al-Andalus to Central Asia, and an extensive disciplinary range, with studies of calendars, conquest, fatāwā, tafsīr, and logic, among other subjects. Part 1 begins with Michael Bonner’s “‘Time Has Come Full Circle’: Markets, Fairs, and the Calendar in Arabia before Islam,” which addresses the intercalation of Arabia’s pre-Islamic calendar and the utility of sources for social history in dealing with this topic. He extends his confirmation of intercalation to a discussion of trade and social activity, noting that the shift to the Islamic lunar calendar indicated a shift to a new moral and social order and a true “revolution” in breaking with the past. In “The Wasiyya of Abū Hāshim: The Impact of Polemic in Premodern Muslim Historiography,” Najam Haider focuses on reports of the alleged testament (in 98/716-17) of Abu Hashim in which, written just before his death, he transferred his imamate and leadership to the Abbasid Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Abdullah. Relying primarily on Jacob Lassner’s approach to early material of this kind, which focuses on political propaganda and ideological debates, the author highlights the competition among reports of this testament and, later on in the Mamluk period, the processes of crafting a historical narrative that removed the polemical aspects. His study exemplifies the use of an alternative approach to early Islamic history, one that focuses on what compilations of historical reports tell us about contemporaneous political situations and religious doctrine, as well as about the historiographic methods of pre-modern historians ...