Early Islam’s defining features may have developed outside Arabia rather than at the Hijaz

Evidence

In Hagarism (1977), Michael Cook and Patricia Crone used non-Arabic sources to present a history of the first century, in which the initial Arabconquest of the Middle East was a purely military one and in which the leading features of Islam were slowly elaborated outside the Arabian peninsula. They also stressed the influence of Samaritan Jewish doctrines and practices on early Islam. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 488

Categorization

• QUESTION: Cook and Crone’s Hagarism thesis — Islam elaborated outside the peninsula, under Samaritan influence — is a counterintuitive proposition worth chasing further.

Related

• Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.79)