A scholar in the desert

ISLAM arose with remarkable speed and mystery. Patricia Crone’s well-stocked mind, clear prose and unflinching intellectual honesty were devoted to explaining why. She had little time for Islam’s own accounts of its origins: “debris” as far as historians were concerned, and hopelessly inconsistent. Far better, she reckoned, to fill the gap with contemporary sources and knowledge of other cultures, from messianic Maoris to Icelanders.

That required both personal and intellectual bravery. The central beliefs of Islam, such as the way the Koran took shape, the life of Muhammad and Islam’s relations with other religions, are sensitive subjects. Outside scrutiny can make tempers flare, especially when the conclusions are expressed in a witty and sardonic style.

That is one reason why copies of “Hagarism”, Ms Crone’s first book, long out of print, now sell for hundreds of dollars. It was published in 1977, the year she whirled like a tornado into Oxford, terrifying the dusty dons. (The Oriental Institute was then a notable source of spies for MI6, despite the fact that the history syllabus for the BA in Arabic ended at 1258, the year the Mongols sacked Baghdad.) Her book drew on Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Persian and Syriac sources, as well as archaeology, to argue that Islam started as an Arab-Jewish tribal rebellion against the Byzantine and Persian empires. The Arab “Hagarenes”—a reference to Abraham’s concubine Hagar—reinvented themselves as a separate monotheistic religion only after they dumped their original messianic Judaism.

Ms Crone took a breezy attitude to religious sentiment. Her book was written “by infidels, for infidels” and no Muslim with faith the size of a mustard seed was likely to believe its thesis. It drew praise, but also a serious scolding from some academics: too conjectural, they said. Ms Crone removed her name, and that of her co-author Michael Cook, from the doorbell of their flat in Marylebone—though, in pre-fatwa days, they did not need to go into hiding.

The authors later distanced themselves from some of the book’s more speculative arguments. But that was the result of conviction, not compromise. Ms Crone’s steely blue eyes and steelier brain shunned any temptation to turn to safer topics, or to cloak her critiques of Islamic tradition in the jargon used by more cautious scholars. She simply refused to treat the Arabs as an exception to the normal rules of history; and something was badly wrong in Islamic studies, she said, if she had to justify that.

Not that she wanted to undermine Islam for the sake of it. She had no time for the extreme revisionists, who argued that Muhammad never existed, or that the Koran was a garbled translation of Aramaic Christian texts. She just wanted to find out what earthly factors and influences might have shaped Islam and fuelled its success. She might not turn up the right answers; but it was right to ask the questions.

The widely held idea of a lucrative spice trade centred on Mecca, for example, was an “orientalist invention” to her. The city was just a desert oasis in Muhammad’s time, with perhaps a modest leather trade. If the Koran called Muhammad’s opponents “olive-growers”, perhaps Islam sprang up farther north. Then came more questions. Why did military slavery play such a distinctive role in Islam? What was the real state of religious freedom in the early years of Islamic conquest? How did the idea of jihad arise? These were puzzles; they did not need to be mysteries.

Smoke and fire

Ms Crone’s erudition was intimidatingly displayed in scores of articles and books. But in person she was fun and unassuming, with a love of cycling and distaste for hierarchy that showed her Danish origins. She made puppet theatres for children, held spectacular New Year parties for her friends, delighted to dance polkas and Strauss waltzes, and at Princeton, New Jersey, where she worked at the Institute for Advanced Study after 1997, assiduously tended both her own garden and a neighbour’s. (Her sorrow when the plants withered was a necessary part of love, she said; a love she also found with a another co-author, Martin Hinds, who died before her.)

A diagnosis of incurable cancer in 2011 turned that comfortable life upside down. She forswore whole-brain radiation, which would have prolonged her life at the risk of dulling her faculties. Instead she turned her formidable mind to the body’s biochemistry. Could medical marijuana, as research suggested, stimulate the body’s endocannabinoid system to delay or even beat the disease? She quizzed scientists, visited labs to see the effects of cannabis on tumour-laden mice, and travelled to Oregon to buy enough dope to make capsules of cannabis oil for her own use.

She had never puffed pot before (prodigious quantities of cigarettes had been her vice). The stuff made her nauseous and forgetful. But it may have helped hold off the cancer: the tumours grew more slowly than expected, giving her precious time.

A documentary film, “For the Life of Me”, funded in part by her friends, charted her battle with the disease and her frustration at America’s prohibitionist laws, which delayed research, wasted effort and sapped hope. It was just the sort of lazy dogmatism she had been battling for decades. Why rely on belief and tradition, when you can search for evidence?