Patricia Crone, Ph.D., (born 1945, Denmark) is a scholar, author and historiographer of early Islamic history working at the Institute for Advanced Study. She co-authored the ground-breaking and controversial The Making of the Islamic World, a book that researched the early history of Islam.

Career

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Patricia Crone completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of London, receiving a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1974. For the next three years she served as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. In 1977 she became a University Lecturer in Islamic history and a Fellow of Jesus College at Oxford University. Dr. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University in 1990, and has held several positions at Cambridge since then. She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992-94, and Reader in Islamic history from 1994 until her appointment to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

Patricia Crone and her associate Michael Cook, working at SOAS at the time, provided an devastating analysis of early Islamic history by looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the Islamic invasion, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by Middle Eastern witnesses to the rise of Islam. They found that Islam, as represented by admittedly biased sources, was in essence a tribal conspiracy against the Byzantine and Persian empires with deep roots in Judaism, and that Arabs and Jews were allies in these conquering communities.

Apparent support for their conclusions came from finds made during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen, where labourers working in the roof discovered fragments of Qu'rans that are among the oldest in existence. German scholars Gerd R. Puin who studied the manuscripts discovered that some of the Qu'ranic writing diverges from the authorised version, which by tradition is considered the pure, unadulterated word of God. What's more, some of the writing appears to have been inscribed over earlier, "rubbed-out" versions of the text. This editing supports the belief of Crone that the Qu'ran as we know it does not date from the time of Mohammad.

Bibliography

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Sole author

• Slaves on Horses : The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (2003) ISBN 0521529409
• Pre-Industrial Societies : Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (2003) ISBN 1851683119
• God's Rule : Government and Islam (2004) ISBN 0231132905
• Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam (2004) ISBN 1593331029
• Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2005) ISBN 0748621946

Coauthor

• The Making of the Islamic World, (1980) ISBN 0521297540
• The Formation of Islam : Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (2002) ISBN 0521588138
• Islamic Historiography (2002) ISBN 0521629365
• Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law : The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (2002) ISBN 0521529492
• Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (2003) ISBN 0521541115

External links

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• Book God's Rule book review

• Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam section beginning at page 231

1945 births | Living people | Danish people | American academics | Historians | Orientalists | Historiographers of Islam

Patricia Crone | Patricia Crone