Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (Book Review‪)‬

Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State. By YEHUDA D. NEVO and JUDITH KOREN. Amherst, New York: PROMETHEUS, 2003. Pp. viii + 462. $32. Crossroads to Islam is a work of profound historical and religious revisionism, based on the research and ideas of the eccentric Israeli archaeologist Yehuda Nevo, collected and completed by Judith Koren after Nevo's death in 1992. Nevo spent much of his career in the Negev desert, studying early Arabic inscriptions and rethinking the origins of Islam. In his controversial article "Towards a Pre-History of Islam" (JSAI 17 [1994] 108-41), Nevo argued that these inscriptions reveal a gradual process in which Islam developed from an indeterminate monotheism to the religion we now know through the first two centuries AH. Crossroads to Islam is still more ambitious. Here Nevo and Koren present a radically new vision for the development of Islam and the Islamic empire, in which the familiar events and personalities of early Islamic history--including the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs--are characters of myth, not history.