Machine summary:
” It contains twenty-two essays written by leading scholars, historians, and philologists in honor of their late colleague and teacher Patricia Crone (professor of Islamic history, Institute for Advanced Study), who passed away a few months after the publication of the volume.
They frequently engage topics addressed in passing in Crone’s own work, notably Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Ed- inburgh University Press, 2004), and The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Six contributions grapple with questions of identity in Islamic history, ad- dressing wide-ranging issues through a reflexive engagement with the cate- gories used by historians to make sense of the past.
Addressing the thorny issue of the relationship between early Islam and the previous two Biblical religions, G.
Stroumsa provides an overview of the different – and so far in- conclusive – attempts to contextualize the emergence of Islam within a pre- dominantly Jewish or Christian context.
While the case Stroumsa makes for a “Jewish Christian” milieu remains tentative, this contribution, penned by a leading scholar of Jewish and Christian thought in Late Antiquity, represents a welcome transdisciplinary perspective on a question that continues to pre- occupy the field.
M. Larkin provides a second case-study of identity re- formulation in the eastern Islamic lands through the figure of al-Mutannabi (915-65).
Reflecting Crone’s commitment to a close reading of primary sources, a number of articles translate and analyze little-known manuscripts.
R. Hoyland examines two brief letters that document Muslim-Christian relationships in the early Umayyad period.