Interrupted Paths and Continuity in the Study of Islamic History

Islamicist Massimo Campanini interviews Michael Cook, 2019 Balzan Prize for Islamic Studies, touching on focal points in his research, method and the historian’s profession, the role of history in education, and the current situation of Islamic Studies.

Massimo Campanini: Professor Cook, the research project you submitted to the Balzan Foundation focuses on The Formation, Maintenance, and Failure of States in Muslim Societies. Having in mind your previous seminal books such as Hagarism (1977), Early Muslim Dogma (1981), and Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000), it seems that you are now more interested than before in political and institutional problems. How is this new research linked to your past work?

Michael Cook: That’s a question that had never occurred to me, but it’s a good one. Looking back over my publications, I can only find three articles that focus on political history (and no books). One article was a microstudy of the expansion of the first Saudi state into a small region of Eastern Arabia, published as long ago as 1989.

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Author

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. 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.
In 2001 he was chosen to be a member of the American Philosophical Society and received the Albert Hourani Book Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received several awards, including the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton, the Farabi Award in the Humanities and Islamic Studies and the Holberg Prize in 2014.

Balzan Prize - 2019