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610 Reviews of Books 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