For the most part this book is a traditional retelling of the story of the early Islamic state as it is found in medieval Muslim sources and in numerous modern introductory works. Indeed, the author himself tells us at the outset that “this book is meant mainly for non-specialists—introductory students and general readers with an interest in the beginnings of Islam. It is not intended to be a work of technical scholarship” (p. 17). Why should it be the object of an academic review at all then? Well, into this otherwise standard narrative is woven the author's own theory, which he has presented elsewhere but which has not found general acceptance among scholars. One would not, however, understand from the way the theory is put forward in this book that it is a controversial one and not part of the general scholarly consensus, and so it is to this aspect that I shall address my attention here.

There are two parts to Donner's theory. First, as he states in the preface, “Islam began as a religious movement—not as a social, economic, or ‘national’ one; in particular, it embodied an intense concern for attaining personal salvation through righteous behaviour” (p. 12). Everyone else, Donner claims, has got this wrong, “including L. Caetani, C. H. Becker, B. Lewis, P. Crone, G. Bowersock, I. Lapidus, and S. Bashear”; all “have argued that the movement was really a kind of nationalist or ‘nativist’ political adventure, in which religion was secondary (and, by implication, merely a pretext for the real objectives).” But this is an unfair portrayal of their views. They take it as self-evident that material interests overlap with ideological ones. At one point Donner does acknowledge this (“it therefore seems best to conclude that the expansion was driven by an indissoluble amalgam of religious and material motives . . .” [p. 197]), but overwhelmingly the book pushes the message that religious concerns overrode all else.

Second, Donner argues that we should distinguish between the earliest period of Islamic history, when Islam was not yet a distinct confession, and a later period, when it had crystallized into a definable religion. In the first stage, from around 622 to 692, it was a movement characterized by a pietistic and intense belief in God and the impending Day of Judgment. Its adherents were simply called “believers” and could be drawn from the ranks of Christians, Jews, or other religious persuasions as long as they accepted the cardinal tenets of one God and an imminent Last Day. In putting forward this idea Donner is responding to a problem in our evidence for the early decades of Islamic history that has vexed many specialists of this period. Before 692 we have extremely few contemporary Muslim documents that make any overt declaration of belief beyond an acknowledgement of basic monotheism, and before 685 none mention Muhammad. One might infer from this either that Islam was not the religion of state or that it was very different from what it later came to be.

If we go for the first option, then we need some other factor, besides religion, that served to bind the conquest society together. The most obvious solution would be to suppose an ethnic component—so Arab conquests rather than Islamic conquests. Donner is very hostile to this idea, principally because he thinks it “represents the facile interpolation back in to the seventh century ce of modern concepts of Arab nationalism” (p. 218). But this is not the case at all; rather we would be making a comparison with conquests by other peoples in Eurasia, such as the Avars, Huns, Goths, Vandals, Slavs, Bulgars, Khazars, Turks, and Mongols. An enormous amount of work has been done on the nature and identity of these peoples in the last two decades, and no one would argue that they were in any way to be equated with modern nations. Rather, they are regarded as coalitions of various groups, often held together by a dominant clan that provides a measure of direction and identity to the whole. Scholars such as Glen Bowersock, Fergus Millar, Irfan Shahid, and Greg Fisher have expended much effort in demonstrating the extent to which the tribes on the margins of Byzantium and Iran had become increasingly integrated within the imperial system in the course of the 4th to 7th centuries and had developed a fledgling identity. It is certainly possible, then, that the conquests began as an Arab affair, with Islam being only one of a number of religions practiced by the Arabs (there were certainly numerous Christian Arab tribes among the conquerors). The transformation that took place at the end of the 7th century would then have been one from a religiously pluralist Arab state, in which the various religions were on an equal footing, to an Islamic state, in which other religions were demoted in favor of Islam.

The second option, that Islam was at the beginning very different from what it subsequently came to be, is Donner's choice and is indeed the current favorite among revisionist-minded Islamicists. To some degree it should seem obvious: do not all religions and civilizations evolve over time? The religion of men born in small tribal communities in west Arabia around 600 could hardly be the same as that of men born into a far-flung, highly urbanized empire around 800 (the first generation from whom we have extant books). But Donner is suggesting more than just the incremental emergence of the ingredients of Islam; he wants to say that Islam itself had no distinct confessional existence in its early stages. Its members were “piety-minded and God-fearing monotheists, of whatever confession” (p. 74). There have been musings along similar lines by other scholars. In particular, Yehuda Nevo speaks of a period of “indeterminate monotheism” on the grounds that the religious message we find in texts from this time (ca. 622–92) “is scarcely identifiable as that of a defined sect” (“Towards a Prehistory of Islam,” Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam 17 [1994]: 112). Donner gives this idea an additional twist by differentiating between “Believers” and “Muslims” and assigning them to successive stages in the development of the new faith. The terms may rather be contemporaneous and reflect different facets of what it meant to belong to Muhammad's community (“believing”/muʾminūn and “submitting”/muslimūn), as is the case for credentes (“believing”) and fideles (“being loyal”) in Roman Christianity, but the claim certainly does merit further investigation. Unfortunately, the popular format of the book means that the proposition is not academically presented and so cannot be reviewed here.

Donner also follows Nevo in contrasting the nonsectarian period with the period following 692 when we witness the emergence of a Muhammad-centered confession. In the words of Donner, “the recognition of Muhammad as prophet was the decisive marker that distinguished Muslims from Christians, Jews, and all others” (p. 112). But what was the place of Muhammad before 692 then? Most new religions begin with adherence to a charismatic reform-minded leader whose adherents fall foul of traditional religious leaders and end up being ostracized by the main community and obliged to go their own way. This was certainly the case with Jesus, and it would seem to have been the case with Muhammad too. Thus diverse authors—a chronicler from Armenia and another from southwest Iran, both writing around 660, the Mesopotamian monk John bar Penkaye, writing in 687, and a Palestinian monk, apparently writing around 640 (references in my Seeing Islam as others saw it [Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1997], pp. 117, 129, 186, 196–97)—characterize the conquerors as followers of Muhammad. Donner argues, nevertheless, that the prime focus of the “believers” was God's oneness and Muhammad came later and asserts that this is backed up by documentary evidence: “the earliest documentary attestations of the shahada [the Muslim profession of faith, RGH], found on coins, papyri, and inscriptions dating before about 66/685, include only the first part of the later ‘double shahada’: ‘There is not god but God’—Muhammad is not yet mentioned” (p. 112). Yet the reverse is true. It is the second part of the shahada, “Muhammad is the envoy of God,” that appears first, on coins dated 685 (ah 66), whereas the first part, “There is no god but God,” does not make its debut until 691 (see my Seeing Islam, p. 551 and excursus F).

Because this work is intended as a book for novices, I draw attention to a few points that might mislead. First, although Donner says that Christians were not obliged to follow the Qurʾan in order to belong to the Believers’ movement, they may well have been discouraged by the Qurʾan's emphasis on the nondivine status of Jesus. One also wonders how Zoroastrians, as dualists, could be fitted into the Believers’ avowedly monotheist outlook. Second, appointing non-Muslims to positions of power and permitting them to build places of worship is not evidence of an ecumenical attitude or the relic of a “Believerish” position but simply reflects the usual pragmatic approach of conquerors faced with the daunting task of running a large foreign bureaucracy and governing a numerically superior body of subjects whom they do not wish to alienate en masse. Third, writings about the Arab conquerors, whether in a positive or negative vein, have to be considered with caution. Donner makes much of the apparently rosy evaluation of Ishoʿyahb III, head of the Dyophysite Church in Iraq and Iran, vis-à-vis the Arabs, but in this particular text he is trying to reassure his coreligionists by claiming that they have a special relationship with the new rulers. However, when some Christians pointed out Ishoʿyahb's considerable wealth to an Arab governor, he suffered imprisonment and torture for refusing to part with any of it; angry at obtaining nothing, the governor pillaged several churches in the vicinity of Kufa and Hira (Seeing Islam, pp. 151–52). Fourth, Donner's claim that “violent conquest” is “predicated on the mistaken notion that the ‘conquerors’ came with the intention of imposing a new religion by force” (p. 108) is outdated and was long ago discredited (e.g., by Bousquet in his 1956 article, selected by Donner for his edited volume, The Expansion of the Early Islamic State [Hants, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2008], no. 3). The Christian Crusaders of medieval Europe are just one example from among many of invaders who pursued conquest (violent I suppose, but can one have nonviolent conquest?) without, for the most part, seeking to impose their religion on the conquered.

This book is well written and does do the job of making early Islamic history more accessible. However, it suffers, to my mind, from two major flaws. First, it tends to dismiss alternative theories, whereas for a book that is intended for beginners one would have liked it to be more open toward different opinions and ideas. Second, it places excessive emphasis on the role of religion. Of course medieval Muslim authors liked to project an image of early Islam as a time of exceptional religiosity—most emergent societies seek to sacralize their origins. Their favorite depiction of the early Muslims is as “warriors by day and monks by night,” and this is indeed close to Donner's own portrayal of them. However, historians are not meant simply to buy into a society's mythopoeia but to deconstruct it. Third, religion is not just about piety but also about communal affiliation, social status, economic choices, the language employed to describe and define reality, and so on. Fourth and finally, though I do not doubt that Muhammad's message included a call to greater piety and a more God-fearing attitude, this does not explain why tens of thousands of the denizens of Arabia felt motivated to respond to his message. To understand this we would need to try and appreciate the socioeconomic context of their lives, to treat them as ordinary humans with material wants and needs as opposed to superhuman beings concerned only with God and Judgment Day.

My comments may appear somewhat harsh, but in truth my frustration is not so much directed toward this book and its author as toward a general trend in the study of the Middle East of this period to focus excessively on religion. This in part reflects a tendency to portray Late Antiquity (ca. 300s–600s) as an era stamped with an aura of holiness—of saints, relics, pilgrims, and spirituality—and in part reflects the current obsession in the West with the religious aspects of Islamic civilization and the popular apprehension that the Muslim world is never more than a few steps away from religious fanaticism. Of course Donner would not concur with this latter view; he is in the apologetic camp rather than the polemic one. He seems to wish to add early Islam to the list of arenas of convivencia, along with medieval Spain and early Abbasid Iraq, a time when Muslims, Jews, and Christians happily and harmoniously coexisted with one another. I sympathize with this aim, which is a worthy one, but it is concerned more with our modern world than with that of Muhammad and his followers.