From Kavad to al-Ghazali: Religion, Law and Political Thought in the Near East, c.600ûc.1100

by Crone,Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780860789567
• ISBN10: 086078956X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This volume brings together twelve articles by Patricia Crone dealing with pre-Islamic and Islamic religion, law and political thought. The first section focuses on the centuries before Islam, with studies on Mazdakism in Iran and on Islam as the key factor behind the outbreak of Iconoclasm in Byzantium. The second group of studies looks at problems in legal history, including the codification of the Qur'an, while the third investigates questions of political thought, amongst them a study of early Muslim anarchists, and an examination of the authorship of a work ascribed to al-Ghazali.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
The Non-Islamic Near East
Kavad's heresy and Mazdak's revolt	1	(446)
Zoroastrian communism	447
Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Byzantine iconoclasm	59	(94)
Law
Jahili and Jewish law: the qasama	153
Two legal problems bearing on the early history of the Qur'an	1	(246)
Weber, Islamic law, and the rise of capitalism	247
Political Thought
Shura as an elective institution	3	(56)
`Even an Ethiopian slave': the transformation of a Sunni tradition	59
A statement by the Najdiyya Kharijites on the dispensability of the imamate	55
Ninth-century Muslim anarchists	3	(82)
The Kharijites and the caliphal title	85	(82)
Did al-Ghazali write a mirror for princes? On the authorship of Nasihat al-muluk	167
Index	1