“How does one write a single volume about a history that extends in time over fourteen centuries and in space from Morocco to Mindanao? The answer, of course, is by leaving most of it out.” Thus does Cook, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, introduce his doorstopper of a study of the Muslim experience over twelve (not fourteen) centuries, until around the year 1800. The author helpfully advises the reader not “to try to get through it in one sitting.”
As the rare historian in English to dare to take up this massive topic in the near-half-century since the 1975 publication of Marshall G.S. Hodgson’s three-volume Venture of Islam,1 Cook (b. 1940) focuses on “the making and unmaking of states, and really major cultural shifts that affect large populations,” while paying less attention to such topics as economics, society, intellectual life, and non-Muslims. He admits to a bias “to the articulate and the opinionated to the virtual exclusion of the silent, the tongue-tied, and the anonymous mass of the population.”
The result is an original, somewhat quirky, always interesting near-thousand pages (when all the extras are counted).
Two curiosities: In 1977, Cook co-authored Hagarism, an explosive reconsideration of Muhammad and early Islam that basically ignored information deriving from Arabic literary sources. Here, he accepts those same sources: “A few decades ago a radical skepticism toward the Arabic sources for the life of Muhammad was widespread in some parts of the Western academy, and in my youth I played a part in this turn.” Cook does not explain this return to the fold; he should.
Second, Cook deftly explains the use of slaves as soldiers (“it often makes sense for states to retain the services of people drawn from marginal groups that do not share the interests of the major stakeholders of the society they rule, since such groups will be less responsive to the society and more dependent on the ruler”) but shies away from explaining why, “although arming slaves had a long past both inside and outside the Muslim world, cases in which the core of an army was formed in this fashion are barely to be found outside it,” deeming this a puzzle “which we will not attempt to solve here.” Perhaps he should have referred readers to this author’s 1981 study, Slave Soldiers and Islam, which seeks to answer precisely that question.
1. Ira M. Lapidus published A History of Islamic Societies in 1988.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
