Patricia Crone's Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands

Patricia Crone's Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness , places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters , pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands , examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands.

Patricia Crone's 'Collected studies in three volumes' brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 3, 'Islam, the ancient Near East and varieties of godlessness', places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. Volume 1, 'The Qur'anic pagans and related matters', pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qur'anic religious milieu. Volume 2, 'The Iranian reception of Islam: The non-traditionalist strands', examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians.0.

Patricia Crone's 'Collected Studies in Three Volumes' brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 1, 'The Qur'anic pagans and related matters', pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qur'anic religious milieu. Volume 2, 'The Iranian reception of Islam: The non-traditionalist strands', examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 3, 'Islam, the ancient near east and varieties of godlessness', places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world.0.

Patricia Crone's Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness

Introduction -- Part I: Late Antique Fantasies: 1. Qur'ānic Others -- 2. Producing Islam through the Production of Religious Others -- 3. Past Perfect: Opening the Jāhiliyya's Complex Present -- Part II: Subsequent Constructions: 4. Good Jew, Bad Jew -- 5. Making Christians -- 6. Shīʻa: The Other Within -- 7. The Amorphous Zindīq -- Conclusions -- Bibliography.

Patricia Crone's Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness

The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

How Christian leaders adapted the governmental practices and political thought of their Muslim rulers in the Abbasid caliphate The Imam of the Christians examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Focusing on the writings of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the patriarch of the Jacobite church, Philip Wood describes how this encounter produced an Islamicate Christianity that differed from the Christianities of Byzantium and western Europe in far more than just theology. In doing so, Wood opens a new window on the world of early Islam and Muslims’ interactions with other religious communities. Wood shows how Dionysius and other Christian clerics, by forging close ties with Muslim elites, were able to command greater power over their coreligionists, such as the right to issue canons regulating the lives of lay people, gather tithes, and use state troops to arrest opponents. In his writings, Dionysius advertises his ease in the courts of ʿAbd Allah ibn Tahir in Raqqa and the caliph al-Ma’mun in Baghdad, presenting himself as an effective advocate for the interests of his fellow Christians because of his knowledge of Arabic and his ability to redeploy Islamic ideas to his own advantage. Strikingly, Dionysius even claims that, like al-Ma’mun, he is an imam since he leads his people in prayer and rules them by popular consent. A wide-ranging examination of Middle Eastern Christian life during a critical period in the development of Islam, The Imam of the Christians is also a case study of the surprising workings of cultural and religious adaptation.

Sceptical Paths offers a fresh look at key junctions in the history of scepticism. Throughout this collection, key figures are reinterpreted, key arguments are reassessed, lesser-known figures are reintroduced, accepted distinctions are challenged, and new ideas are explored. The historiography of scepticism is usually based on a distinction between ancient and modern. The former is understood as a way of life which focuses on enquiry, whereas the latter is taken to be an epistemological approach which focuses on doubt. The studies in Sceptical Paths not only deepen the understanding of these approaches, but also show how ancient sceptical ideas find their way into modern thought, and modern sceptical ideas are anticipated in ancient thought. Within this state of affairs, the presence of sceptical arguments within Medieval philosophy is reflected in full force, not only enriching the historical narrative, but also introducing another layer to the sceptical discourse, namely its employment within theological settings. The various studies in this book exhibit the rich variety of expression in which scepticism manifests itself within various context and set against various philosophical and religious doctrines, schools, and approaches.