76 REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Arabian would do in such case, e.g., ana Salib bin Salib al-'Awlaqi-ma hadd fi
'l-dunya mithl anal
P.119: iegeret, plant name. In western Arabia shigarah just means "a plant" -may this
not be its sense here?
i&iez, "frankincense", seems to figure in a medieval Yemeni text.
P.121: iarh, "party, celebration, dancing". This dance for Hadramawt has been described
in various publications by the reviewer; it seems also to figure in ESA.
P.I22: ierex, "crayfish", at al-Mukalla and al-Shihr, sharkh.
P.129: ths, "to slip". This is equivalent to the Hadrami tahas, which is a nickname of the
village of 'Inat.
Professor Johnstone has communicated the following misprints for emendation: p. 53,1.
10, for iodes read sodes; p. 155, "bracelet", manger, read mangeri (Urdu bangri). It may be
remarked that Harsusi has Arabic words where Mehri has its own words, and that many
words belonging to the non-Arabic languages have been preserved in Hadrami colloquial
Arabic - these latter are probably not known to the mountain dialects of the Yemen. His
researches on Harsusi having proved so fruitful of interesting new data, Johnstone's work on
the richer field of Mehri should be even more valuable.

R. B. SERJEANT.

Q U R A N I C S T U D I E S : S O U R C E S AND METHODS O F S C R I P T U R A L I N T E R P R E T A T I O N .
By J. WANSBROUGH. (London Oriental Series, Vol. 31.) pp. xxvi, 256. Oxford, University
Press, 1977. £16.

HAGARISM: THE MAKING OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD. By PATRICIA CRONE and

MICHAEL COOK. pp. ix, 268. Cambridge, University Press, 1977. £7.50.
Arabic studies have both gained and suffered from their original association in the West
with Hebrew, but Dr. Wansbrough's book takes a thoroughly reactionary stand in reverting
to the over-emphasis of the Hebrew element in Islam as exemplified in such scholars as
Wensinck. His very method is contentious in applying Hebrew technical terms to Arabic
exegesis - "Halakhic", "Haggadic", "Massoretic" - in order to create a Hebrew setting for
the Qur'an. It has been possible honestly to answer Muslim allegations, too frequently justi-
fied, of bias in Western writers on Islam, that contemporary scholarship is enlightenedly
objective, its conclusions, if not always acceptable, reached in good faith. It is the more dis-
appointing to discover both these books pervaded by prejudice against Islam. In Wansbrough's
early chapters on revelation, canon, and prophethood one has the sense of a disguised
polemic seeking to strip Islam and the Prophet of all but the minimum of originality.
A glance at the Qur'an will immediately show that it does not, as Wansbrough (p. 74)
asserts, consist "almost exclusively of elements adapted from the Judeo-Christian" - which
he suggests must have disabled its sectaries in controversy with Jews and Christians. Not
only does this ignore, among others, the vital Arabian element (about which he appears ill-
or uninformed), but the Prophet himself and his followers deliberately drew upon these
elements to carry refutation into the Jewish and Christian camps. Why should he insist that
the Sirah is concerned to locate the origins of Islam in the Hijaz (implying that this is not
the case) when the plain and uncontested evidence is that the Hijaz was its birthplace?
Wansbrough avers (p. 47) that in certain Qur'anic passages "ellipsis and repetition are
such as to suggest not the carefully executed project of one or of many men, but rather the
product of an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long
period of transmission". In this he is of course attempting to fit the process by which the
canon of the Hebrew Bible was established, on to the Qur'an, but it won't wash! J. Burton,
in his recent Collection of the Qur'an (Cambridge, 1976), argues vastly more cogently than
Wansbrough's unsubstantiable assertions, that the consonantal text of the Qur'an before us
is the Prophet's own recension. His findings certainly come nearer the truth, for Bell's anal-
ysis reveals how many passages were re-worked (at least once) to apply to fresh situations.

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 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 77

A canonical consonantal text was plainly early established. It may be compared with
Epigraphic South Arabian, which has a consonantal text but no surviving oral tradition of
vowelling - whereas the early Qur'anic text has. Only the committed to a Hebrew origin for
Islam could see "the 'Uthmanic recension story as a reflex of the Rabbinic academy at
Jamnia". Inconsistencies in the accounts of the recension of the Qur'an exist, but all evidence
points undeniably to an 'Uthmanic recension after which there were no significant differ-
ences. An historical circumstance so public cannot have been invented, and the promulgation
of a canonical text is a natural development not requiring a precedent from another faith.
It will not for a moment be denied that during the Prophet's unsuccessful attempt to
incorporate the Yathrib Jews into Islam, the Qur'an addresses them in terms of their own
religion, and resort was had to Judeo-Christian narrative to point an Arabian moral. It may
be regarded as typical of the liberal attitude of early Islamic exegetists that they referred to
Judeo-Christian material, notably the Isrd'iliyyat, but this is only one of the many aspects
of their labours. Wansbrough's pabulum is largely concentrated on Hebraists' writings on
Islam and this must have contributed to his unbalanced assessment of the Judaistic element.
Like some other writers Wansbrough has neglected the significant new data emerging
from Epigraphic South Arabian. He accepts (p. 183) Vajda's theory of "transposition of
anti-Jewish elements of Islamic prescription into the category of superseded Jahili custom".
Yet several of these — public lamentation at funerals, ritual purity regulations, etc., were
shown by J. Ryckmans in 1973 to be known to pre-Islamic inscriptions.
Space permits only the following examples of misinterpretation, but the indications are
that more than a few others are there. It is stated (p. 10) that "The course of covenantal
imagery was clearly Biblical, and predominantly Pentateuchal." Yet the terms cited, habl
and 'ahd, are of the very stuff of tribal politics in ancient Arabia, independently of any
Judaic concepts. Had Wansbrough consulted, for instance, G. Garbini in Oriens Antiquus,
XII, 1973, he would have found the phrase, "costitui tutta una comunita di dei e di patroni,
di alleati, e di fedarati (wd/Hblm)". References to pacts and treaties are numerous (cf. also
J. Ryckmans) in pre-Islamic material, and, if associated in the Qur'an or Epigraphic South
Arabian with AUah or pagan gods, it is because the commonest type of political organization
was the theocracy. Qur'an, XXIII, 8, considered by Bell to be early Medinan, does not appear
to refer to a covenant between God and Man, but here, and in VIII, 27, and LXX, 32, to
"things deposited" about which one is not to be deceptive, pace Tabari, and seems to be an
injunction analogous to the obligation to discharge one's debts found not only in pre-Islamic
inscriptions but in Bukhari's Sahih, etc. Again (p. 11) bara'ah is called the reflex of berit in
the sense of "peace", but this is not the sense it bears in the Qur'anic passages, for in LIV,
43, it means something like "dispensation" - in point of fact bara'ah is "declaring oneself
quit of an obligation, withdrawal from a treaty".
In the question of law so closely allied to Qur'anic exegesis, Goitein considers that "the
striking resemblances between early Islam and Judaism" in many aspects "seem to originate
from parallel developments rather than borrowing". This is a warning that should be heeded.
While Wansbrough's range of reading is praiseworthy, there is little here new to Arabists
- his untenable subjective theories apart. The chapter on the origins of Classical Arabic,
based on standard sources, is unexceptional, but that on "Principles of exegesis" is tedious,
perhaps because exegesis often tends to be dull and pettifogging, and it is sometimes contro-
versial. In point of methodology it cannot be agreed (p. 139) that "the attempt to extrapo-
late from later works those of earlier authorities" does not produce accurate results - the
essence of scholarly judgement is to appreciate the limitations of doing so.
Wansbrough appears to set out to convince us of his learning. This he has achieved.
Clearly, beyond possibility of doubt, he is acquainted with the vocabulary of Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin, often recherche, used in literary criticism - of his sense of Arabic and that inde-
finable quality of judgement one is far less sure. His pages are unattractively larded with
German technical terminology where English would provide a more lucid text. The outcome
is a turgidity quite unparalleled in one's experience, particularly in the first two chapters.
After wrestling with style and vocabulary one is frequently left puzzled about the meaning.
Learning does not necessarily equate with scholarship; obscurity is a fault, not a virtue. The
book is badly put together and the reader is left in confusion and incoherence. It cannot be

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 78 REVIEWS OF BOOKS

accepted, as arrogantly asserted, that "As a document susceptible of analysis by the instru-
ments and techniques of Biblical criticism it [the Qur'an] is virtually unknown." Earlier
scholars apart, such as the great Noldeke, this is to ignore the patient, modestly presented
study of Bell (his analytical translation does not even figure in the Bibliography). Though
one is by no means required to accept it in toto, it is a vital preliminary to that aspect of
exegesis treated in this volume.
Hagarism, foaled in the same stable, though lacking the depth of Dr. Wansbrough's undis-
puted learning, is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies
are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a "leg-pull", pure "spoof" - like Jean
d'Ormession's The glory of the empire (London, 1974), except that it grows ever more tire-
some as one reads further. It is slowly realized that the combination of involved verbiage
and staccato style are a striving after effect, smartness, the epigram - which somehow fails
to come off! Two examples must suffice. "The dynastic legitimation of the Persian kings
having been broken by a wilful God to produce an occasionalist politics, the kings could
remain with a certain instrumental legitimacy, just as their science could hang on as a pro-
fane armoury of statecraft" (p. 104); "When a conceptual orthodoxy threatened to take
over their over-extended ghetto, the Muslim rabbis had themselves to develop a dogmatism
that had no place in the rabbinic tradition: the intimate features of their personal God were
reduced to a cold anthropomorphism expounded with doctrinaire obscurantism . .. the
theologians were forced to develop a conceptual Luddism that was no part of the intellectual
tradition: the elegant concepts of the impersonal universe were reduced to an anticonceptual
occasionalism, a bizarre fusion of theistic voluntarism and atheistic atomism . . . ." (p. 128)!
Given the authors profess to be Islamic historians, they are sadly out of touch with con-
temporary research on Islam and their aspersions on early Islamic sources are characterized
by a false confidence engendered by a superficial scanning of Western criticism oihadith.
Why should the Syriac sources, not new of course to Islamic historians, with their hostility
to Islam, be considered more trustworthy than the Arabic historians?
Relying on "contemporary non-Muslim sources to reconstruct a phase in the history of
the religion 'Hajarism' which the Islamic tradition has itself suppressed" (sic), the authors
have invented the "Hajarenes". If those historians dub the Arabian Muslims "Ishmaelites" or
"Hajarites", this is surely a disparaging allusion to the traditional descent of their Arab
conquerors from the bondwoman Hajar? The Hebrew name means "stranger", parallel to
Arabic dakhil, one who has taken refuge with others. Hijrah means neither "exodus" nor
Wansbrough's "exile". The Islamic muhajirun are incontrovertibly "emigrants" seeking the
protection of others. As "a phase in the history of the religion" (sic) "Hajarism" exists only
in the authors' imagination and misinterpretation of texts.
One learns with astonishment that "there is some reason to suppose that the Koran was
put together out of a plurality of early Hagarene religious works", and that "the Islamic
imamate is a Samaritan caique". Have these young authors ever read the Qur'an attentively,
or, in their more modest way, are they seeking the fame won by the ingenious Hebraist who
associated Jesus Christ with the mushroom?
The pretentious reading list (it cannot be called a bibliography) ignores Bell, Sweetman,
D. J. Sahas's John of Damascus on Islam - perhaps so awkward as not to fit in with the
authors' fancies? On the wide-ranging lines of discussion by clever second-year undergrad-
uates, such irrelevancies as writings on Zen Buddhism and Shiva are included, while the
indispensable studies for the history of Islamic origins of G. Ryckmans (Les religions pre-
Islamiques), J. Ryckmans, A. F. L. Beeston, and Irfan Shahid are ignored.
After ploughing through this tiresome travesty of history one finds on the dust-cover the
authors' self-assured assertion, 'This challenging book will be of interest to all those con-
cerned with the study of Islamic history and civilisation . . . It is also a major contribution
to the history of religion and history of ideas." Scholars of mark - Lyall, Browne, Nichol-
son, Arberry — have published with the Cambridge Press. The more the pity that it has been
so ill advised as to be "conned" into giving its imprimatur to this pretentious humbug.

R. B. SERJEANT.

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