The Islamic Scholarly Tradition Studies in History, Law, and Thought in Honor of Professor Michael Allan Cook By Asad Q. Ahmed, Behnam Sadeghi, and Michael Bonner, eds. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011. 385 pages.)

Abstract

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 ...