Michael Cook

Michael Allan Cook FBA (born 1940) is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam. Biography Michael Cook developed an early interest in Turkey and Ottoman history and studied history and oriental studies at King's College, Cambridge 1959-1963 and did postgraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London 1963–1966. He was lecturer in Economic History with reference to the Middle East at SOAS 1966-1984 and reader in the History of the Near and Middle East 1984–1986. In 1986, he was appointed Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Since 2007, he has been Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Spring 1990. Research In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Cook and his associate Patricia Crone provided a new analysis of early Islamic history by studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam. They fundamentally questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam. Thus they tried to produce the picture of Islam's beginnings only from non-Arabic sources. By studying the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, which were written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses, they reconstructed a significantly different story of Islam's beginnings, compared with the story known from the Islamic traditions. Cook and Crone claimed to be able to explain exactly how Islam came into being by the fusion of various near eastern civilizations under Arabic leadership. Later, Michael Cook refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings, and concentrated on Islamic ethics and law. Patricia Crone later suggested that the book was “a graduate essay" and "a hypothesis," not "a conclusive finding.” In his work Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2000), Michael Cook, in the chapter on the doctrine of al-Amr bi'l-Maʿrūf wa'l-Nahy ʿan il-Munkar among the Ibāḍīs, makes a comparison between western and eastern Ibāḍism and with the doctrines of the other Islamic sects and schools. The eastern and western Ibāḍīs represent two distinct historical communities with largely separate literary heritages, at least until, roughly, the beginning of the twentieth century.