Reading through the introductory chapters in The Crucible of Islam brought to mind numerous educational experiences of past decades. One was my introduction to Mas'udi's Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) in a class with Tarif Khalidi at the American University of Beirut; another was being shown the site of renewed excavations at Fusṭaṭ (original garrison city now incorporated into the outskirts of Cairo), and portions of some tri-lingual (Greek, Coptic, Arabic) documents found there by George Scanlon. Still another was having lunch with Irfan Shahid (who characterized himself as “the last spiritual descendant of the Christian Arab phylarchoi of Bilad al-Sham”) at Dumbarton Oaks. Yet another were visits to ‘Umayyad sites (the “Desert Castles”) near ʿAmman with David Kennedy. Thus learning the history of Islam's emergence had a personal context, and Glen Bowersock's new book has evoked a sense of nostalgia.
More than half of this book's nine chapters is devoted to the “backstory” of Islam, all set precisely within the Arabian Peninsula and adjacent areas that formed the suggested “crucible” of its title. Accordingly, we don't “meet” Muḥammad until Chapter 6. Worthy of note is Bowersock's critique of the late Patricia Crone's controversial argument that Mecca was a nondescript settlement of questionable antiquity on the eve of Islam (51-54). He draws on earlier criticism (that of Robert Serjeant is paramount) and subsequent strong rejoinders by Crone, as well as the long under-rated evidence of Ptolemy of Alexandria's Geography for this critique. Attested to in his text as Makoraba, Mecca's notable existence goes back at least a full five centuries before the birth of the Prophet. Bowersock also demonstrates (Chapter 2) the growing evidence for a durable strain of polytheism throughout the Arabian Peninsula (particularly in Mecca), despite the inroads of Judaism and Christianity during the first six centuries CE.
Adequate attention is given to sometimes incomplete and usually biased contemporary and later literary sources, and the slender—but ever-increasing—epigraphic corpus. For the former, Bowersock meticulously attends not only to the Greek and Latin witnesses, but also to what has survived in Nabataean, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Amharic. Command of disparate written sources has always been a hallmark of his research, and Arabia in the broadest sense has been his special interest since the early 1970s. He is careful to survey recent archaeological reports and their associated numismatic discoveries (57 and n17; 81 and n2; 91 and n13). The spectacular site of ancient Hegra (not indexed as such e.g. 40 or 49, but instead under Ḥijr and its modern name Madā’in Sāleh) continues to produce striking finds. Too late for inclusion is the report of the fifth season's results: see now Laïla Nehmé (ed.), Madā’in Sālih Archaeological Project: Report on the 2016 Season (December 2016). Warfare and shifting alliances within the territories contested by Byzantium, Persia, and Ethiopia are further explored, as are the obligatory intrusions from neighboring powers at times of major tectonic imperial tensions.
Bowersock aptly characterizes such volatility in the political terrain as a “time of transition, which remains today the most obscure and poorly documented period in the history of late antique Arabia . . .” (67-68). Of particular interest to Bowersock is the date of Muḥammad's move from Mecca to Yathrib (later Medina) within the perspective of Byzantine-Persian relations in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem in 614 and the reprisal attack on Persia by Heraclius precisely in 622. The timing of the hijra is one of only a few certain dates regarding the lifetime of the Prophet. Bowersock is also cognizant of insider and outsider perspectives in the history of early Islam. He is clearly wary of legendary overtones within the ḥadith collections regarding details of the Prophet's trading travels outside Arabia, e.g. not even his alleged business journey to Bostra (Buṣra al-Shams) in southeastern Syria is mentioned. Tensions between theological and academic interpretations are also key to Christian histories, and on this point see Herbert Berg and Sarah Rollins, “The Historical Muhammad and the Historical Jesus: A Comparison of Scholarly Reinventions and Reinterpretations,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 37 (2008): 271–92.
Some remarks on the editorial aspects of this volume are relevant. Repetitions include the incorrect “emigrating to” (I counted a dozen instances of it), and the overuse of “irredentist”. Reprising full source publication data in the endnotes of all chapters is acknowledged (189) as being reader-helpful, but it then obviates the need for a bibliography, however “select”. There are a negligible number of typos (e.g., intrusive “the” on 184, notes 1 and 3). Characterizing the Dome of the Rock as a “mosque” (140) is a bit tricky without mentioning that the sequence of early mosques in Jerusalem is still not clear. While a wood-built structure may have functioned briefly as a mosque in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem, the Dome that replaced it soon became a “sanctuary” without a specific religious function c. 690.
Almost half of the sixteen main sources in the select bibliography are dated as recently as 2014–15, but honorable mention should go to several not registered therein. One is Thomas Bauer's Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des Islam (Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011). Though Bauer's narrative takes us from the lifetime of the Prophet through the establishment of the ʿAbbasid era, his concern is less with historical events than it is with the creation of a new Mediterranean-wide culture. Another unrecognized work is the four volume selected compendium of Andreas Goerke's earlier publication Muhammad (Routledge, 2015). The Crucible of Islam offers readers a thoughtful introduction to such larger studies. We have all experienced meals after which the appetizer is sometimes more memorable than the main dish. This volume can be counted as one of those.
