Content
Crone found no evidence of Mecca being an important trading center in late antiquity of 6th and 7th century CE: *Mecca was not on the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.431 *Even if it had been, the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria was not very important compared to the maritime trade route *by the end of the second century AD at latest, the route was no longer in use. *A close examination of the Muslim sources themselves show that, except for Yemeni perfume, the Meccans traded mainly in cheap leather goods and clothing, and occasionally, in basic foodstuffs (clarified butter and cheese) *These goods were not exported to Syria, which already had plenty of them, but were supplied almost exclusively to inhabitants of the Peninsula.If it is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-distance trade of the kind described in traditional Islamic literature, there ought to have been some mention of it in the writings of their customers who wrote extensively about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics. Despite the considerable attention paid to Arabian affairs there is no mention at all of Quraysh (the tribe of Mohammed) and their trading center Mecca, be it in theShe concludes that "Meccans did not trade outside of Mecca on the eve of Islam". That there was no continuous transmission of historical fact through the three generations or so that separated the early first/seventh century from the mid-second/eight century" and that the lines of transmission of the accounts were "pure fabrications". Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.432 Crone also found Islamic "traditions" to be unreliable, conflicting "with each other so often and so regularly `that one could were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in the reverse.'" An examination of all available evidence and sources leads Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career took place not in Mecca and Medina or in southwest Arabia at all, but in northwest Arabia.Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...,Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...,Syriac Syriac may refer to: *Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic *Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region * Syriac alphabet ** Syriac (Unicode block) ** Syriac Supplement * Neo-Aramaic languages a ...,Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ..., Coptic, or other literature composed outside Arabia.
Reception
Robert Bertram Serjeant described the book as a "confused, irrational and illogical polemic, further complicated by her misunderstanding of Arabic texts, her lack of comprehension of the social structure of Arabia, and twisting of the clear sense of other writings, ancient and modern, to suit her contentions." Abdullah al-Andalusi of the Muslim Debate Initiative contended Crone's placing Islamic events not in Mecca, but closer to theReferences
Bibliography