Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World · Aramean Archive

Title: Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
Creator: Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.
Date: 1977
Description: Crone and Cook argue that Syrian Christians (Suryane) moved from an older ethnic frame to a primarily religious one: as Christianity reordered communal life around baptism and Eucharist, “Aramean” came to be associated with a defeated pagan past and was relinquished as an ethnic badge, even though the word survived in usage (especially for language). In a note they add that the Suryane of Nestorian Iraq “quite frequently speak of themselves and their language as Aramean.” By contrast, pagan Harranians kept “Aramean” precisely by binding it to their native cult, maintaining a nation-plus-religion identity and hopes of restoring an earthly polity.

The later trajectory of these East-Syrian Iraqis aligns with the modern naming shift documented elsewhere in your sources: from the nineteenth century, Western missionaries and writers popularized “Assyrian” for the non-Catholic heirs of the Church of the East, and by the early twentieth century many descendants of those Iraqi communities publicly identified as Assyrian.
Language: English
Publisher: Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Patricia Crone & Michael Cook, 1977, pp. 63, 196.; archive.org
Subject: History

Media: Hagarism; The Making of the Islamic World-Crone, Cook_0072 (1).jpg; Hagarism; The Making of the Islamic World-Crone, Cook_0205 (1).jpg