Watt’s economic-mecca thesis about Islam’s origins was later demolished by Patricia Crone
Evidence
Watt placed a great deal of stress upon what he supposed was the economic background to the Prophet’s preaching. He presented Mecca as the centre of a trading empire in which the Quraysh tribe (to which Muhammad belonged) grew wealthy on the profits of the transit trade in spices, as well as their custodianship of a pagan shrine crowded with idols. (Later this pseudo-historical construct was efficiently demolished by Patricia Crone.42) According to Watt, the transition in the seventh century to a mercantile economy in Mecca produced social tensions. Islam was in a sense a product of those tensions and a solution to them. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 481
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the larger narrative of Orientalist scholarship being successively demolished — Crone’s critique parallels Wansbrough’s skepticism of the sources.