My issue is with your assessment of Crone, to which I have written an 8 paged (albeit unfinished) response (based on our last discussion of her), believe it or not. I am actually considering making it a proper essay contra what Parker wrote on academia. Anyway.
He has modified his paper. Academia is offline now. I translated it on the web :
Therefore: "The only way out of this dilemma is to get out of the Islamic tradition and start again." P. Crone & M. Cook, Hagarism, op. cit., 1977, p. 3.
Not really. "The only way..." would have been to question, first, the foundation of this tradition: the existence, within the supposedly historical framework of the Muslim narrative's "Mecca/Medina / Prophet Mohammed", of the figure presented as having produced the Koranic corpus in a specific place and time. And according to it, no others. Having well understood the problem , that it is in fact only partially "start again" it, she immediately settles it following this explanatory statement. She does so by taking out of its hat an external and contemporary source of the events of the 7th century, considered as validating the existence of a prophetic figure accompanying them. A well-known source which, de facto, implies, seen from here and now, in one way or another, that it is this figure that produces the Koranic corpus presented by the Muslim narrative framework. Indeed, who could it be? Almost all of the research has followed. Prophetic figure related to the events of the 7th century, mentioned in this source, namely, the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati. The link between the two is immediately accepted, as the importance of the "Mecca/Medina / Prophet Mohammed" framework is naturally intense. It becomes difficult to put a source to a rigorous examination when it allows the problem of the historical existence of Mohammed to be solved/discarded and then removed by identifying the prophetic figure in question with that of the Muslim narrative. In what it proposes to do, we will consider that Hagarism is therefore vitiated from the very beginning . It's a real-false "start again". Leaving "the Islamic tradition and starting over" cannot avoid questioning the historical foundation of the Muslim narrative which is the framework "Mecca/Medina / Prophet Mohammed", not only as a vector and explanation of the events of the 7th century as quietly stated in all school textbooks, but also as an explanation that it gives to the existence of the Koranic corpus. Because in the Muslim narrative, everything is linked. If the Arabs did what they did in the 7th century, and are what they are at the beginning of the 9th century, for them, it is because of the preaching of the Koranic corpus in Mecca/Medina at the origin of these historical events. And nothing else. See L.I. Conrad, "Al-Azdī's History of the Arab Conquests in Bilād al-Shām: Some Historiographical Observations" in Bakhit, M.A., (ed.) Proceedings of the Second Symposium on the History of Bilad al-Sham During The Early Islamic Period Up to 40 A.H./640 A.D., Amman, p.28-62, p.40, n.46.
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator
Topic: Qur'anic studies today