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Pastimes : Understanding Islam -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (1290)	3/7/2002 8:16:16 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2926

IGIT. You have likely already seen this web site but I post it anyway and perhaps you have comments.? " If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless." " Crone is one of the most iconoclastic of these scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s she wrote and collaborated on several books -- most notoriously, with Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) -- that made radical arguments about the origins of Islam and the writing of Islamic history. Among Hagarism's controversial claims were suggestions that the text of the Koran came into being later than is now believed ("There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century"); that Mecca was not the initial Islamic sanctuary ("[the evidence] points unambiguously to a sanctuary in north-west Arabia ... Mecca was secondary"); that the Arab conquests preceded the institutionalization of Islam " " But Crone has continued to challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) she made a detailed argument challenging the prevailing view among Western (and some Muslim) scholars that Islam arose in response to the Arabian spice trade." " My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad," he says. "Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself." Full article >>> theatlantic.com