Cook and Crone’s Hagarism theory was dismissed as racist and anti-Semitic

Evidence

It pleases Ibn Warraq tremendously that Cook and Crone argue that Islam is really an offshoot of a Jewish messianic movement. Their theory was almost immediately dismissed by other historians, partly because it is predicated on the mad notion that Muslims have spent centuries misrepresenting their own history, partly because in its essence it is both racist and anti-Semitic in its fantasy of an early Jewish conspiracy against Christianity. Both in its original formulation and in Ibn Warraq’s malign reiteration, the bizarre argument is that later Islamic sources have fabricated an early history for Islam and hidden the fact that their faith is really nothing but a Judaic messianic cult invented to dislodge Christianity. In reality, of course, both Islam and Christianity are, in their very essence, rooted in Judaic prophetic tradition, but not as a result of delusional conspiracies of the sort that Cook and Crone dreamed up and Ibn Warraq passes along with evident glee. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Hagarism is often cited in pop-atheist and internet circles as credible scholarship; Dabashi’s account of its academic dismissal is a useful counterweight.