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contribution to it; that despite endemic male chauvinism, the party helped and promoted women in important ways; and that much of what happened to female
workers stemmed above all from the drive for "desperately needed capital" (p. 105). In providing this
mixed picture of processes and outcomes, Goldman
contributes to a deepening picture of Soviet life as
characterized by a wide range of developments and
reactions, guided from above in key respects only in
the crudest sense.
ROBERT W. THURSTON
Miami University,
Ohio
MIDDLE EAST AND NORTHERN AFRICA
G. R. HAWTING. The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence
of Islam: From Polemic to History. (Cambridge Studies
in Islamic Civilization.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 168. $54.95.
The commonplace story about Islam's beginnings is
that the Arabian Prophet Muhammad had his first
revelation in Mecca in 610 c.E., when he was forty
years old. Revelations from God (Allah in Arabic),
were transmitted periodically by the angel Gabriel to
Muhammad until the prophet's death in 632 c.E. and
later gathered together in a book, the Qur'an. Its
message was to call Jews, Christians, and polytheistic
Arabs to surrender to God: that is, become Muslims.
Only after Muhammad's death did followers of the
nascent religion emerge from Arabia to transform
Islam into a world religion. This story, with minor
variations, is both the believers' tale and the generally
accepted version in the West. The bulk of early Islamic
literature supports this story and has been the raw
material for most Western histories of Islam.
G. R. Hawting proposes a radically different picture
of Islam's origins. He questions both the audience of
the Qur'an and the location of its composition. In this
short monograph, written primarily for the expert,
Hawting puts forth two hypotheses in support of his
contention that the believers' story is wrong. His first,
set out in chapter two, is that the Qur' anic polemic
against idolaters aims at Jews and Christians, who can
be compared to idolaters in their interpretations of
God's message. In chapter three, he identifies many
instances in which the charge of idolatry is used
polemically by Jews, Christians, and Muslims against
each other in intra and extramural attacks. He cites
considerable evidence to back his claim, and the
reader is left with little doubt that accusations of
idolatry have been used against those who regarded
themselves as monotheists, as the charge of polytheism
was used against the Christian belief in the Trinity.
Hawting points out that the Qur' an has no word for
idolatry as such. The words normally translated as
"idolatry" have somewhat different senses than the
Greek eidololatreia. Shirk (association) can mean associating other deities with God, but it can also mean
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
lesser kinds of associating, such as forming a business
partnership. Kufr (unbelief), another term applied to
idolaters, means both unbelief and ingratitude. In
Qur'anic polemic, being "ungrateful" to God is tantamount to denying his existence, but it does not necessarily mean worshipping idols. In fact, contends Hawting, we learn little about idolatry as a practice from
the Qur' an, only that it is to be condemned.
Hawting's second major contention rests on his first.
If we learn little of substance from the Qur' an about
the Arabian practice of idol worship, and if the use of
polemic against idolaters is really an intermonotheistic
polemic, then either the Arab hearers of the Qur' an
were themselves monotheists, or the Qur' an developed outside of Arabia among Jews and Christians. In
embracing the extra-Arabian development of the
Qur'an and, hence, of Islam itself, Hawting is following the thesis of John E. Wansbrough in The Sectarian
Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation
History (1978), that our understanding of early Islam's
origin rests on internal Islamic sources that are only
"salvation history" and do not reflect actual history.
Wansbrough, and the more well-known articulation of
his thesis by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), capitalize
on old critiques of the historicity of the biographies of
Muhammad and early Qur' an commentaries upon
which the believers' story is based. They also make use
of some modern critics that deny that any text can
reflect an underlying reality. Hawting follows them,
taking great pains to show that internal Islamic evidence cannot be trusted, that external evidence does
not support the insider's story, and that the whole story
should be rejected.
Having laid out his theses and expressed a preference for the extra-Arabian origin of the Qur'an, one
might expect some portion of Hawting's interesting
monograph to examine Qur' anic evidence that would
indicate its composition outside of Arabia: linguistic
evidence from Iraq or Syria, toponyms that would not
be Arabian, or archaeological finds. Instead, he discusses how imperfect is our knowledge of polytheism
in pre-Islamic Arabia, a discussion that shows his
considerable erudition but fails to support his theses.
In my opinion, he does not do justice to the Qur'anic
and other evidence that does exist for polytheism. Nor
does he give sufficient credit to the degree of penetration of Judaism and Christianity into Arabia that could
account for what we find in the Qur'an. Although we
have far less knowledge than we would like about
Islam's earliest beginnings, we have even less evidence
to support a theory that totally rejects the familiar
history.
GoRDON D. NEWBY
Emory University
MICHAEL CooK. Commanding Right and Forbidding
Wrong in Islamic Thought. New York: Cambridge
University Press. 2000. Pp. xvii, 702. $85.00.
APRIL 2003