An Introduction to Islam.

• Author: Hoover, Jon
• Position: Book review

An Introduction to Islam. Second edition. By DAVID WAINES. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xi + 367. $65 (cloth); $23 (paper).

The text of David Waines' second edition of this Introduction is almost exactly that of the 1995 first edition, with the exceptions of a new preface, updated bibliography, and thirty-four additional pages on recent events. A few reviewers of the first edition complained of orientalism in the selection of pictures, none of which came from Europe or the Americas. The second edition now includes photographs of an Arab-American Museum in Western dress, the Islamic Center in Toledo, Ohio, and the Regent's Park Mosque in London. Overdoing it perhaps, the American flag also now appears in two pictures.

This book is an excellent introduction to the development of the Islamic religious tradition, but it does get off to a bumpy start, and, as I will note later, this second edition comes to a peculiar end. In the interest of presenting "the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad as Muslims might recognize them" (p. 3), the first chapter takes a literary approach, outlining Ibn Hisham's (d. 828 or 833) biography of the Prophet and summarizing the Qur'an's contents thematically. Nevertheless, Waines does venture a few historical-critical assessments. The richly detailed account of Ibn Hisham is a late source that is already the product of tradition and thus "no more than the main events of the Prophet's life will be known with certainty" (p. 11). Despite this measure of skepticism, Waines confidently situates the Qur'an and the rise of Islam in seventh-century western Arabia against a religious backdrop composed of "an amalgam of low traditions, a kind of common pool of pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices, many of which probably bordered on the heretical" (p. 27).

Waines says just enough to arouse suspicion that major controversy attends historical study of Islam's beginnings, but for this the reader must turn to the "Excursus on Islamic origins" at the end of the book. This excursus--written in something approaching the dense style of a bibliographical essay--introduces us to Muslims who take their own traditional sources as reliable accounts of what happened and then to modern historical-critical scholars. Waines divides the latter into "doves" and "hawks." Doves trust that traditional Muslim accounts of Islam's emergence in central-western Arabia are right in the main, and they attribute the rise of Islam to the influence of Christianity (Bell) or Judaism (Torrey) or to socio-economic factors (Watt). Hawks, on the other hand, see the traditional sources as no more than Heilsgeschichte and on the basis of limited external evidence suggest Palestine or northwestern Arabia as the place of Islam's origin (Cook and Crone)...