Michael Cook

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Michael Cook

Michael Allan Cook (born December 24, 1940 ) is a British scholar of Islam .

Life

He studied at Cambridge and at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London . In 1986 he accepted a position at Princeton University . He is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Cook is a member of the American Philosophical Society (2001) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004). In 2002, he received the $ 1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation for significant humanities research. In 2014 he received the Holberg Prize and in 2019 the Balzan Prize .

research

In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Cook and co-author Patricia Crone presented a radically new study of early Islamic history. The starting point was to fundamentally question the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam. So they tried to get an idea of ​​the beginnings of Islam from non-Arab sources alone. By studying the only surviving contemporary sources on the beginnings of Islam, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac, they reconstructed a story from the beginnings of Islam that looked significantly different from the history as it was from the Islamic ones Sources is known. Cook and Crone believed they could explain exactly how Islam arose from the fusion of various Middle Eastern cultures under Arab leadership. Cook later distanced himself from this attempt at a detailed reconstruction of the true beginnings of Islam and focused on Islamic ethics and legislation.

Cook's main work is Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000), in which he examines the historical development of Islamic ethics from its beginnings through the centuries to the present day.

Fonts

  • Studies in the Origins of Early Islamic Culture and Tradition. Ashgate Variorum, Aldershot 2004, ISBN 0-86078-916-0 .
  • A Brief History of the Human Race. Norton, New York NY et al. 2003, ISBN 0-393-05231-1 .
  • Forbidding Wrong in Islam. An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-53602-2 .
  • Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2000, ISBN 0-521-66174-9 .
  • The Quran. A very short Introduction (= Very Short Introductions. Stimulating Ways in to New Subjects. 13). Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2000, ISBN 0-19-285344-9 (In German: The Koran. A brief introduction (= Reclam's Universal Library . 18232). Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-018232-8 ).
  • Muhammad. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 1983, ISBN 0-19-287606-6 .
  • Muhammad. In: Founders of Faith. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 1986, ISBN 0-19-287658-9 , pp. 289-366.
  • with Kristina Grant: Manual of Archival Description (= British Library. R & D Report. 5867). The Society of Archivists, London 1986, ISBN 0-902886-22-3 .
  • Early Muslim dogma. A Source-Critical Study. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1981, ISBN 0-521-23379-8 .
  • with Patricia Crone : Hagarism. The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1977, ISBN 0-521-29754-0 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Holberg Price 2014: About Michael Cook
personal data
SURNAME Cook, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cook, Michael Allan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British scholar of Islam
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1940