Near Eastern Studies

NES Faculty

Michael Cook
Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies

email: mcook@princeton.edu
powerpoint presentation

I was educated at Cambridge (the real Cambridge, not the one in Massachusetts); I spent two years there studying English and European history, and two learning Turkish and Persian. From there I went on to the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, where I embarked on research into Ottoman population history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I then spent a good many years teaching and researching in Islamic history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, till in 1986 I crossed the Atlantic to take up a position at Princeton.

When I began my research, it was common knowledge that the history that really counted was economic and social history pursued with rigorously quantitative methods. Since then common knowledge has shifted, and so have my research interests. Much of what I have published has been concerned with the formation of Islamic civilization, and the role played by religious values in that process. Recently I have published a monograph on a very Islamic value: al-amr bi`l-ma'ruf - roughly, the duty of each and every Muslim to tell people off for violating God's law. I also have the usual scatter of unfinished papers on various topics.

At graduate level, my teaching tends to be tailored to my own interests and those of current graduates. My preference is for courses that are centered on Arabic texts, and designed to give graduates practice in finding their way around the primary sources. My undergraduate teaching includes a course on the early centuries of Islamic history. I teach this approximately every other year, and it is often taken by graduates with a suitable upgrade. I am also offering a new undergraduate course on World History down to the European expansion; I hope that this will in due course provide some opportunities for graduates to precept.

I have supervised a dozen completed dissertations since I came to Princeton. Michael Bonner worked on the Byzantine-Arab frontier in the early Abbasid period. Keith Lewinstein wrote an analysis of the formation and transmission of early Islamic heresiographical literature. Jon Katz made a study of the dream-diary of an eccentric late-medieval North African Sufi. Yitzhak Nakash researched the interaction of Shi'ism and national identity in modern Iraq. Nurit Tsafrir wrote on the early spread of the Hanafi law-school. David Marmer investigated the political culture of the Abbasid court in the late third and early fourth centuries of the Hijra. Nimrod Hurvitz's topic was Ibn Hanbal and the formation of Islamic orthodoxy. Adam Sabra wrote on poverty and charity in Mamluk Cairo. Adrien Leites analyzed traditions on the time of day or night at which the Prophet was born. Ronen Raz studied the reactions of Arab intellectuals to Orientalism in the period 1798-1950. Shahab Ahmed scrutinized the early narratives of the Satanic Verses incident. Taken together, these dissertations account for a fair proportion of what I now know.

Representative Publications:

Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 1450-1600, London 1972.

"The origins of kalam," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 43 (1980).

Early Muslim Dogma: a Source-Critical Study, Cambridge 1981.

"Pharaonic History in Medieval Egypt," Studia Islamica, 57 (1983).

"Magian Cheese: an Archaic Problem in Islamic Law," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 47 (1984).

"The Expansion of the First Saudi state: the Case of Washm," in C.E. Bosworth and others (ed.), The Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis, Princeton 1989.

"Eschatology and the Dating of Traditions," Princeton Papers, 1 (1992).

"Ibn Qutayba and the Monkeys," Studia Islamica, 89 (1999).

The Koran (in the OUP "Very Short Introductions series"), Oxford 2000.

"Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought," Cambridge 2000.

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