A short and readable pdf:
What do we actually know about Muhammad?Also
God's Rule, Government and Islam which looks interesting but takes forever to load. Review
here.
This is a brilliant contribution to Islamic studies. The first third of the book explains the origin of the various Muslim sects, religiopolitical factions, and parties and movements as they evolved in response to the historical circumstances of the first two Muslim centuries. Much of it is based on the author's previous contributions. The political, religious, and philosophical positions of the Shiites, Mutazilites, Abbasids, Zaydis, Imamis, and the Hadith party are explained with incisive clarity and rich detail.
The second part is a review of the Muslim political literatures in the Persian and Greek traditions, and Ismaili and Sunni theory, of the period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Though less revealing, this part sets the stage for the final third of the book, which deals with the nature and functions of government, the concepts of freedom and society, and the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. Set out logically and thematically, these chapters explain the positions of the major schools and sects on each of the issues.
The chapter on the nature of government—which deals with the questions of why people live in societies, why they must have law, why law must be God-given, and why God-given law necessitates a monarchical and absolutist regime—is the most powerful and revealing chapter in the book. An equally interesting chapter on Muslims and non-Muslims lays out the concept of holy war, explicates the justifications for Muslim religious imperialisms, the debates about the treatment of non-Muslims, and Muslim attitudes toward conversions. An unusual added dimension is the discussion of Muslim views on the treatment of dissident or nonconforming Muslims and the law of war in such cases. These thematic reviews will be the most useful to scholars and students outside of the field, but because of the way in which the views of the various schools are fragmented by topic, it will not be easy to get an overview of the individual positions.
This important book, however, suffers from some of the limitations inherent in Islamic scholarship. The book is concerned with literary discourses, which are only one dimension of political thinking. Real-world political culture—including individual loyalties and ambitions, family and tribal commitments, patronage and clientage, and struggles for power and wealth—is not considered.
Despite its forceful clarity and strong logical orderliness, the book will not be easy to read for people outside of the field. The historical examples are selected far and wide in the period from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries in the region from Central Asia to the Atlantic. The high level of detail and the endless references to historical persons and events that will not be familiar to uninitiated readers are a barrier to a wider audience. So too is the absence, apart from sporadic passing comments, of any comparative reference to Western or other political theory. That Crone is conventionally historical and literary in her approach and does not break new methodological ground is not a criticism of her work, but a comment on the isolation of Islamic studies from other fields, and a caution that the subject has become so self-referential that even someone so brilliant and learned does not readily communicate with scholars outside of her field.
Topic: Hagarism