Feb 24, 2000 The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #13), Michael Alan Cook The Koran has constituted a remarkably resilient core of identity and continuity for a religious tradition that is now in its fifteenth century. Michael Cook's brief biography of Muhammad meets all the criteria of a fine, insightful analysis, worthy of repeated readings. I had first come across it in a graduate school seminar on 'Muhammad and the origins of Islam' back in 1989, and I was immediately struck by its conciseness, its getting down to basics in narrating the life.

Michael Allan CookFBA (born in 1940) is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam.

Biography[edit]

He studied history and oriental studies at King's College, Cambridge 1959-1963 and did postgraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London 1963-1966 under the supervision of Professor Bernard Lewis after he was awarded the Marshall Scholarship. He was lecturer in Economic History with reference to the Middle East at SOAS 1966-1984 and reader in the History of the Near and Middle East 1984-1986. In 1986, he was appointed Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Since 2007, he has been Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Spring 1990.^[1]

Research[edit]

In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Cook and his associate Patricia Crone provided a new analysis of early Islamic history by studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam. They fundamentally questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam. Thus they tried to produce the picture of Islam's beginnings only from non-Arabic sources. By studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, which were written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses, they reconstructed a significantly different story of Islam's beginnings, compared with the story known from the Islamic traditions. Cook and Crone claimed to be able to explain exactly how Islam came into being by the fusion of various near eastern civilizations under Arabic leadership. Later, Michael Cook refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings, and concentrated on Islamic ethics and law.^[2]

In his work Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2000), Michael Cook, in the chapter on the doctrine of al-Amr bi'l-Maʿrūf wa'l-Nahy ʿan il-Munkar among the Ibāḍīs, makes a comparison between western and eastern Ibāḍism and with the doctrines of the other Islamic sects and schools. The eastern and western Ibāḍīs represent two distinct historical communities with largely separate literary heritages, at least until, roughly, the beginning of the twentieth century. There are occasional links between them: one shared literary borrowing (Māwardī, Ghazālī), the unusual doctrine that the verbal obligation does not lapse when the offender will not listen, the equally unusual interest in women as performers of the duty. Differences are likely to reflect the very different political histories of the two wings of the sect. In Oman, the resilience of the Imamate down the centuries finds obvious and direct expression in the frequency with which the Omani sources link forbidding wrong with this institution. In the West, where the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Imamate was filled in part by clerical organisation and authority, the scholars seem to have become less cautious about the role of the individual performer. Comparing the Ibāḍī doctrine of forbidding wrong with the doctrines of other Islamic sects and schools, the significant point is that, left aside the close association of forbidding wrong with righteous rebellion and state-formation which the Ibāḍīs share with the Zaydīs, Ibāḍī views do not in any systematic way diverge from those of the Islamic mainstream.^[3]

Cook's main work is Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000), in which he analyses the historical development of Islamic ethics from the beginnings through the centuries till today. In 2002 he was one of five recipients of the Andrew Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, which comes with up to $1.5 million.

Criticism[edit]

R. B. Serjeant describes Hagarism as 'bitterly anti-Islamic' and 'anti-Arabian.'^[4]

Cook's most recent work, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics (2014), has been criticized by Duke Religion scholar, Bruce Lawrence, as an 'anti-Islam manifesto.'^[5]

Recognition[edit]

• In 2001 he was chosen to be a member of the American Philosophical Society.
• In 2001 he received the Albert Hourani Book Award^[6]
• In 2002 he received the prestigious $1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation for significant contribution to humanities research.^{[7][dead link]}
• In 2004 he was chosen to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[8]
• In 2006 he won Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton.
• In 2008 he won Farabi Award in the Humanities and Islamic Studies.
• In 2013 he and Patricia Crone were awarded an honorary doctorate at Leiden University.^[9]
• In 2014 he won the Holberg Prize
• In 2019 he won the Balzan Prize

Works[edit]

Michael Cook Ballet

• Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, with Patricia Crone.
• Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study, 1981.
• Muhammad (Past Masters), 1983.
• The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, 2000.
• Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 2001 (Winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award).
• Forbidding Wrong in Islam: An Introduction (Themes in Islamic History), 2003.
• A Brief History of the Human Race, New York 2003.
• Studies in the Origins of Early Islamic Culture and Tradition, 2004.
• (ed.): The New Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. (six vols, 4,929pp)^[10]
• Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, 2014

Works related to Ibadism[edit]

• Cook, Michael: (1981) Early muslim dogma. A source critical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ISBN0-521-23379-8.^[3]
• Cook, Michael: (2000) Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN0521-661749.^[3]

Michael Cook Dj

Notes[edit]

Michael Cook Singer

1. ^Michael Allan Cook at Holberg Prize page
2. ^'Holberg Price 2014: About Michael Cook'. Archived from the original on 2016-08-14. Retrieved 2016-08-14.
3. ^ ^abcCusters, Martin H. (2016). Al-Ibāḍiyya: A Bibliography, Volume 3 (Second revised and enlarged ed.). Hildesheim-London-N.Y.: Olms Publishing. p. 179.
4. ^Serjeant, R. B. (1978). 'Review of Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, ; Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World'. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1): 76–78. JSTOR25210922.
5. ^Lawrence, Bruce B. (2017-06-01). 'Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective. By Michael Cook'. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 85 (2): 555–558. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfx014. ISSN0002-7189.
6. ^Albert Hourani Book AwardArchived 2010-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
7. ^2002 Distinguished Achievement Award Recipients Mellon Foundation
8. ^Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Retrieved 10 February 2010
9. ^'Honorary Doctorates at Leiden for Arabists Patricia Crone & Michael Cook and for translator Rien Verhoef'. Leiden University. Retrieved 9 February 2013.
10. ^Malcolm, Noel (2011-02-06). 'The New Cambridge History of Islam Ed by Michael Cook et al: review'. ISSN0307-1235. Retrieved 2019-08-28.

External links[edit]

• Faculty description page at Princeton University.
• In 384 pages? Cook chronicles history of the human race by Jennifer Altmann, Princeton Weekly Bulletin, June 14, 2004

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