On Slaves on Horses

Um, what the fuck?

Okay, so I found this to be a really tough read, even though it’s only 90 pages (with 210 pages of appendices and notes). From the outset, the book was difficult for me to swallow, as the first two chapters seem blanketed with condescension. Crone here says that she followed the same methodology of her earlier book, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, so I took a look at a few scholarly reviews to figure out what was going on here, as I haven’t read the work itself.

Crone’s primary argument in both of these works is a methodological one—early Arabic sources should not be taken too seriously. They were produced to both defend and solidify nascent Islam and the series of states that succeeded Muhammad and the companions of the Prophet. This makes a lot of sense. As a result, Crone suggests that we should look to other contemporary sources to truly understand the Islamic conquests.

In Hagarism, she argues that most 7th century peoples referred to Arab conquerors as “Hagarenes” (from Hagar, see Genesis). The Hagarenes were a coalition of Jews and Arabs from the Hijaz that sought to re-take the Holy Land from the Roman Empire (or, the Byzantine Empire, if you will). Muhammad lived two years longer than generally thought, in Crone’s view, and succeeded in conquering Palestine (the hijra then refers to the migration of Arabs to Jerusalem, rather than Medina). However, in Palestine, Arab conquerors became concerned about becoming too thoroughly Judaized. Arabs broke with the Jews and developed close relationships with Christians, combining these different traditions into the religion that we today call Islam. They continued with successes for decades and wound up consolidating power in Mesopotamia, where Arabs also adopted many traditions from rabbinical Judaism. As a result, the Arab conquests were fundamentally a messianic Jewish movement.

Although I can’t interpret any of the sources that Crone uses here—I don’t know the languages—my (little) knowledge of the scholarship at hand tells me that this narrative is absolutely bonkers. Crone might agree, but I think she would say that the disparity between the narrative developed by Arabic sources and that of other peoples tells us that there’s something fundamentally wrong with relying so heavily on early Islamic historians. Maybe she’s onto something here, but I’m not so certain.

The argument in this book is that, in the transformation of the Islamic “polity” from one of conquering peoples to a proper state, administrations in Baghdad continually turned to weaker peoples in order to carry out their will. Initially, the bulk of state power belonged in the hands of Arab military leaders, then it was absorbed more by lesser soldiers and bureaucrats—largely from Khorasan, before finally moving largely into the hands of militant, Turkic slaves (Mamluks).

As I said earlier, I’m not familiar enough with the sources or debates at hand to evaluate this, but I’m profoundly skeptical of Crone’s work. I like her arguments about the dogmatism of relying so heavily on Islamic sources, but it seems that Crone pushes too hard hear in the opposite direction. That said, many of the academic reviews I’ve seen have praised Crone on methodological grounds, so perhaps I’m a bit out of step here.