Table of Contents

Preface; Part 1: The Beginnings; 1. The Origins of Government; 2. The First Civil War and Sect Formation; 3. The Umayyads; Part 2: The Waning of the Tribal Tradition, c.700-900; 4. General; 5. The Kharijites; 6. The Mu'tazilites; 7. The Shi'ites of the Umayyad Period; 8. The 'Abbasids and Shi'ism; 9. The Zaydis; 10. The Imamis; 11. The Hadith Party; Part 3: Coping with a Fragmented World; 12. General; 13. The Persian Tradition and Advice Literature; 14. The Greek Tradition and 'Political Science'; 15. The Ismailis; 16. The Sunnis; Part 4: Government and Society; 17. The Nature of Government; 18. The Functions of Government; 19. Visions of Freedom; 20. The Social Order; 21. Muslims and Non-Muslims; (a) Infidels; (b) Muslisms as Infidels; 22. Epilogue: Religion, Government and Society Revisited; Bibliography, Abbreviations and Conventions; Index and Glossary.

About the Author

Patricia Crone is Mellon Professor of Islamic History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She is author of several books including Pre-industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-modern World (2003), Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987), Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) and Slaves on Horses: the Evolution of Islamic Polity (1980).

Reviews

'This rich and wide-ranging book ... is stimulating and provocative... Crone's lucid style aims to make a complex, ostensibly alien, tradition intelligible to the general reader as well as to the Islamic specialist.' Times Literary Supplement