The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt And Local Zoroastrianism - Crone, Patricia | 9781107642386 | Amazon.com.au | Books

The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt And Local Zoroastrianism - Crone, Patricia | 9781107642386 | Amazon.com.au | Books




The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt And Local Zoroastrianism
by Patricia Crone (Author) Format: Paperback
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (34)

Patricia Crone's book is about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts subsequently triggered there and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. The book also describes a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has demonstrated a remarkable persistence in Iran across a period of two millennia. The central thesis is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi'ism on Iran. This learned and engaging book by one of the most influential scholars of early Islamic history casts entirely new light on the nature of religion in pre-Islamic Iran and on the persistence of Iranian religious beliefs both outside and inside Islam after the Arab conquest.



Review
'What needs to be stressed about The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran is that it is a book of rare intellectual courage. It is written in such a way that we are left in no doubt as to the momentous issues that were at stake in this procession of seemingly bizarre creeds and persons, in a land which, for most outsiders of the time (Arab Muslims quite as much as Byzantine Christians), was as distant and majestic as the face of the moon … Patricia Crone's book has made this battle intelligible and vivid to us, and as real and urgent, in its wider implications, as if it had happened only yesterday.' Times Literary Supplement

'The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran is the story of an immense and mysterious landscape, intermittently rocked, throughout the late antique and early Islamic periods (effectively from around 250 to 850 AD), by detonations of religious fervor sparked by social unrest … The thrill of this book is that it brings the Iranian world into the mainstream of late antique history. Iran is seen as yet another participant in the religious and intellectual upheavals of the time.' The New York Review of Books

'One of Patricia Crone's achievements in her magnificent book on Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic conquest is to shed new light on sex on the Iranian plateau … using sources, besides Herodotus, that range from hostile Muslim missionaries to Buddhist pilgrims, she establishes that polyandry, the lending of wombs, and the renting of inseminators were not uncommon and that incestuous marriage was encouraged under Zoroastrian law.' Christopher de Bellaigue, Common Knowledge

'Crone's Nativist Prophets is a tour de force of data collection from primary sources and scholarly publications. It presents much fascinating information about localized discontents, specific beliefs, and marginal practices.' Jamsheed K. Choksy, Journal of the American Oriental Society
Book Description
This learned and engaging study casts new light on the nature of religion in pre-Islamic Iran.
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Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 20 March 2014
Edition ‏ : ‎ Bilingual

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From other countries

Hans-Peter Muller

4.0 out of 5 stars An Iranian Blend

Reviewed in Germany on 18 July 2013

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

How did the Iranians respond to forcible imposition of yet immature Islamic ideas, which, by definition, blend those of the older religions Judaism and Christianity? Well, they rebelled. But not so fast.

The Revolts

Much commenced with the Persian general Abu Muslim Khorasani (d. 755) and Islam’s third civil war (749/50) when members of the Hashimiyya in Khorasan revolted against the ruling Umayyads. Abu Muslim’s origin, whose original Persian name was Behzadan, remains obscure, though. During the rebellion against the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II, Abu Muslim was sent to Khorasan by the leader of the Abbasid rebellion, Ibrahim bin Muhammad, where he headed the uprising since 747. When Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah was proclaimed first Abbasid caliph in 749, Abu Muslim assumed office as governor in Khorasan where he gained almost legendary status among Muslims (both Shi’tes and Sunnis), Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians alike. Relations with the caliph and his successor deteriorated, though. Abu Muslim was eventually ordered to Madain by caliph al-Mansur when he unavailingly tried to appoint Abu Muslim governor in Egypt and Syria. There he was killed and his mutilated body thrown into the river Tigris in 755.

The Iranian revolts took mainly place before and after this third civil war, when the Abbasid Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah (the “blood shedder”) had eventually defeated the troops of Marwan II on the banks of the Great Zab river in Northern Iraq. Times were troubled indeed. Before and after, Alids had tried to rebel as well. In Kufa, Zayd ibn Ali, son of the fourth Shi’a Imam Ali ibn Husain Zayn al-Abidin, revolted in 739/40 and was killed in a battle with the Umayyad governor there. His son Yahiya ibn Zayn continued his father’s struggle. He went to Khorasan through Mada’in and remained in disguise in Balkh until he was arrested. He was imprisoned for some time until he was able to escape after the death of Umayyad Caliph Hashim ibn Abd al-Malik with many Shi’ites from Khorasan gathering around him. He headed toward Nishapur and engaged there in a battle with its governor, Umar ibn Zurarah al-Qasri, whose army he defeated. In 743 he was wounded in the forehead at Jawzjan and killed at the battle arena at the age of only 18 years while his forces dispersed. Crone mentions sources (p. 104) in her new book as to which Yahiya might have been a descendant of another propagandist in Transoxiana after Abu Muslim’s killing in 755, Ishaq al-Turk. Whether Ishak “had allegedly fled from the Umayyads to Turkish Transoxiana and later adopted Muslimi beliefs by way of camouflage” (taqiyya?) is questionable. Crone writes, “It probably reflects the fact that Yahiya b. Zayd was a hero to many of those who venerated Abu Muslim, for Yahiya was a member of the same holy family that Abu Muslim had worked for, and both had been victimised by the ‘Arabs’ who did not understand what their own prophet had preached,” and “One sub-group of the Ishaqiyya claimed that their imam had fled from the Umayyads and the Abbasids to the land of the Turks, where he was now staying and whence the mahdi would come forth, speaking only Turkish. Their Ishaq sounds like our refugee from Sunbadh’s (see below) army mixed up with Yahiya b. Zayd, the refugee from the Umayyads.” Also Abdallah ibn Mu’awiya, Zayd’s cousin and Yahiya’s uncle, and his followers, the Harbiyya/Janahiyya, rebelled after both had been killed. Ibn Mu’awiya’s revolt was joined by the Zaydiyya and even Kharijites. He was killed on behalf of the Abbasids in 748 just by Abu Muslim, to whom he had fled in hope for cooperation, while imprisoned in Herat.

Abu Muslim’s killing in 755 sparked further revolts. One of the insurgents in the Jibal was his close friend Sunbadh (d. 755), a former member of the Iranian aristocracy and now leader of the Muslimiyya. He rebelled in Rayy in 755 but was defeated after only 70 days. Sunbadh denied Abu Muslim’s death and was inclined to deify his friend. And he must have been the founder of the Khurramites, a sect and political movement which has its roots in proto-socialist Mazdakism, a heresy re-introduced in the early 6th century by a Persian reformer and religious activist, Mazdak. Khurramis were Shi’ites but most of their doctrines were those of the Zoroastrians.

As Crone stresses Khurramism was not an intrinsically subversive or rebellious creed but rather friendly and pacifist. Anyway, in Azerbaijan it was the utterly cruel and bloodthirsty Khurramite leader Babak (d. 838) who rebelled against the Abbasids under caliph al-Ma’mun, and his rebellion lasted for more than 20 years. Al-Mamun’s successor Abu Ishak al-Mut’asim appointed in 835 his general Haydar bin Kavus Afshin to fight Babak and his Khurramites in Azerbaijan. Afshin got hold of him only two years later. Babak was executed under torture in 838.

Further to the East, in Sogdia in Transoxiana, it was another ethnically Persian insurgent who went into hiding a couple of years after Abu Muslim had been killed and started a rebellion (around 768), al-Muqanna (d. 779?). It might even be that he also had been a commander under Abu Muslim. His original name was Hashim al-Hakim, or Ata, but he became famous under the name he gave himself, al-Muqanna, or the veiled one. Al-Muqanna claimed to be a prophet, or even re-incarnation of God, a role which had passed to him via Abu Muslim, Ali and Muhammad. He used magic to impress his followers, the Mubayyida. When besieged in his fortress he committed suicide. He, too, was a member of the Khurramiya. While other Khurramite followers at that time wore red clothes, those of Al-Muqanna wore white in opposition to the black clothes of the Abbasids.

Khurramism and Beyond

Albeit an orthodox version of Zoroastrianisms had been re-established as sort of state religion under the Sasanids (224-651 CE), there had never been only Zoroastrians in Iran. As Patricia Crone writes in her preface,

“This is a book about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts that the Muslims triggered there, and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. It is also a book about a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has shown remarkable persistence in Iran over a period of two millennia. The central thesis of the book is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and has occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi’ism on Iran.”

While the first part of Crone’s book entertains and summarizes what had been published before, in particular by Elton L. Daniel, the second part deals with specific religions and their heresies and beliefs which met in pre-Islamic and early-Islamic Iran, including and with a focus on Khurramism.

The name of the Khurramis is derived from Persian khurram, “happy, cheerful”. It is a blend with much (albeit utterly heretic) Zoroastrian belief in it. Antinomianism, cosmological principles of light and darkness, repeat reincarnation of any creatures. Cleanliness and purification. Non-violence, except when raising the banner of revolt; including avoidance of killing animals and vegetarian diet, or shockingly (for Muslims) only allowing carrion. Or equally scandalous, sharing of women at least by mutual consent. Drinking wine. In brief, freedom of enjoying all kinds of pleasure as long as nobody was harmed.

For the apparent panpsychism of the Khurramis, i.e. their conviction that everything is alive and endowed with sould, spirit, or mind; and likewise their strong belief in reincarnation biblical-type monotheism was intolerably reductionist. Crone explains (p. 273ff),

“From the Khurrami point of view the Christians were better than the Jews and Muslims in that they accepted the idea of God incarnating himself in human beings and also spoke much about the holy spirit. The Gnostics were even better, and best of all were the Platonists, whether pagan, Gnostic, Christian, or Muslim. It is not for nothing than Platonism became an integral part of Iranian Islam.”

The other major characteristic of Khurramism is alienation, in particular political which started with their unhappy encounters with Muslim society when Iran was colonized, postrevolutionary violence, ruined lives.

“Everybody else had followed imams of error; only they (the Khurramis) knew that the guardianship of the Prophet’s message had passed to Abu Muslim or Khidash (a Hashimite missionary in Khurasan, who had been repudiated for having adopted the Khurramite heresy already in 737), who had been betrayed and killed by the powers that be. The Muslimiyya would curse the killers and weep over their martyrs, clearly identifying their dire fate with their own. Eventually they enrolled the Persian kings as imams, and so implicitly as martyrs too. The followers of Abdallah b. Mu’awiya were also defined by loyalty to a martyred hero. So too, of course, were many Shi’ites who were not Khurramis and who wept over al-Husayn. In all cases the evil powers were humans, usually the caliph and his supporters, the ‘Arabs’ who called themselves Muslims, and no attempt seems to have been made to retell the story of the evil powers on a cosmic scale, as an account of the creation. In line with this, what the devotees of martyred heroes dreamed about was not escape from the world, but rather vengeance: the hero would come back, or a descendant of his would do so, and he would kill the oppressors, purify the world, and restore the oppressed minority to power.”

As Crone notes (p. 275), like Shi’te extremism, Khurramism was meant to insulate people, “building religious walls around their communities when the mountains no longer sufficed.” The Muslim conquistadors reduced the countryside to urban subservience and imposed their single transcendent God which was intolerable for the mountaineers. Crone (p. 276),

“They opted out in the name of the nearest they could find to their own religion in Islam, meaning Shi’ism stretched to the limits to accomodate their views. They did so as Khurramis, as Qarmatis and other kinds of Ismailis, above all the Nizaris, and eventually as members of all the quasi-Islamic communities that appeared in regions from the Jibal to Anatolia after the Mongol invasions. But it was not until the Safavid conquest of Iran that the mountaineers got their revenge, with consequences that are still with us.”

In her preface, Crone recommends readers to start with chapter 1 which introduces the actors and sets the scene for Khurranism which it dealt with extensively in chapter 2. It’s a good one. As usual, her new text is heavy stuff, not easy to digest. Crone’s dense writing is demanding, and quoting so numerous hardly accessible Arabic, Persian, Pahlavi, Greek, Syriac, Buddhist, Manichaean primary sources, including Middle Iranian texts recovered from Central Asia and Central Asian archaeology is stunning and highly admirable. In chapter 3, Crone tries to systematically examine specific marital patterns and reproductive strategies discernible behind Muslim accusations of ‘wife-sharing’. While in the eastern part of Iran fraternal polyandry was indeed widely practiced, in the west it was temporary co-marriage, something which is custom even in present-day Iran (nikah al-mut’ah). Anyway, when and wherever Muslims invaded the former Sasanian empire they brought with them a new marital regime and denounced alternative customes as barbarian and incest, a form of, well, pre-modern Orientalism. What closingly follows is a description of the role of sharing wifes and property in the formation of an ancient communist utopian ideal, namely Mazdakism, in Sasanian Iran.

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Farzana

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!

Reviewed in the United States on 17 June 2014

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Anyone interested in this time, region or topic, should add this brilliant original book to their academic library. Additionally, Patricia Crone can write well, so at certain points, I lifted my head from the page and asked, "Why hasn't someone made a movie out of this?" In my lifetime of extensive academic reading, this is has not been a common reaction. Usually, I get another double espresso latte as the turgid historical landscape unfurls,but with Crone, I yelp and gurgle, and mutter, "Well, I never knew that!" until the other patrons of the coffee shop ease slowly away from me.

Yes, she assumes you have some basic background, yes, she toddles off into all sorts of unexpected directions, yes, one might quibble with translations or assumptions, or violently object to interpretations, but she kicks starts even the jaded academic into reassessing, pawing through references, and even - I blush and shudder - hitting Wiki, Get this book, dear reader in or out of the field, and get it now.

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hywel jopling

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 October 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Exceptional book on a fascinating area of study

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Axel Van der Stappen

5.0 out of 5 stars Early Islam in Persia

Reviewed in France on 16 January 2018

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Just Fantastic.

How Muslims came in Iran and how did they take power so quickly. A superb analysis. An open window on a misty period of our History.

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Lauren Tea

5.0 out of 5 stars In depth and interesting

Reviewed in the United States on 6 January 2021

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This book is a beautiful little history book.

It centers on Persia and the revolts after the Muslim takeover of the land.

Anyone who’s a fan of Islamic history

Should buy this book.

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Denis Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 November 2015

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Extremely informative

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Rosebubl

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 February 2016

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a1

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Jason

4.0 out of 5 stars Iran After the Muslim Conquest

Reviewed in the United States on 2 July 2018

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What happened to Iranian society and Zoroastrianism in the wake of the Arab conquests in the 7th century? Ms. Crone attempts to pierce the gloom and shadows and look at the revolts by local Zoroastrian communities against Muslim rule in Iran. The text examines revolts in both western Iran and Azerbaijan as well as in eastern Iran and Trans-Oriana. Much of the work is skillful detection, untangling of accounts and filtering out bias, in order to see the rebels in their own terms. Thus, the text is dense in that sense. I had first read about these rebellions in J.B. Bury's history of the Later Roman Empire, so I was familiar with the topic beforehand. Your mileage may vary.

The rebels, called Khurramites, combined elements of Zoroastrianism and Shi'ite Islam to form a new religious narrative. The second part of the book is a thorough discussion of the religion. Topics include their view of God and cosmology, reincarnation, ethos and various topics. The rebels were accused of sharing women, so Ms. Crone also has an appendix on this controversial aspect. All in all this is the best book on Zoroastrianism after the Muslim conquest, the Khurramite movement and its continuing legacy in Iran. There are some maps in the front of the text, but they use small print and are hard to read.

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Philip Leetch

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on 30 November 2015

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I found it fascinating- such erudition, careful analysis and intriguing material. A gem.

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anthony

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2015

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good

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Matthias Goertz

3.0 out of 5 stars Impressive scholarship--but the scholarly buck stops at religious myth

Reviewed in the United States on 9 November 2025

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Fascinating topic. There is a lot of solid bottom-up scholarship, assembling of historical evidence. The first time one becomes really uneasy re the scholarship is when the author refers to purely literary concepts such as "Israelites" and "Jewish people" as if they were historical, as opposed to literary, i.e., mythical (the former were invented by the Pentateuchalists, the latter by the Moderns); this is periphery to her treatise, but it alerts the reader to her treatment of Zoroastrianism, which is central to it. "What then made a religion Zoroastrian? The answer has to be indebtedness to the Avestan tradition." (p. 319). Agreed (most scholars agree, too). But what does this "scholar interested in historical origins of doctrines" (p. 318) not do? Investigate the historical origin of that vaunted "Avestan tradition." Somewhere in passing she locates one of the Avesta books in the Achaemenid period; and since she agrees with the conventional consensus that the Gathas are the oldest part, therefore these as well (or else the pre-Achaemenid). At any rate, she spends no time on investigating when the Avesta was IN FACT written. Without saying so outright, she evidently accepts conventional myth about the antiquity of this literature/doctrine. The result is that all of traditional Iranic religion is subsumed under Zoroastrianism and "Avestan tradition" even though there is no attempt at all to demonstrate that these things actually existed in early historical times.

My own research locates the Avesta and the Pahlavi Zoroastrian literature (the "Pahlavi books" in her terminology) in the 10th c. CE. By her definition, then, Zoroastrianism and an "Avestan tradition" could not have existed before the 10th c. CE. They are a late and marginal, as opposed to an early and pervasive, phenomenon. My position is just that, at must be subject to scrutiny. But the point is: she does not develop her own position, nor does she critique the conventional consensus, but simply goes along with the flow, nonchalantly. This is were scholarly inquiry turns into myth-propagation. If she was to seriously investigate the "historical origins of [the] doctrine[s]" of Avestan Zoroastianism, she would very likely find that she has to rewrite much of this treatise.

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