This volume brings together twelve articles by Patricia Crone dealing with pre-Islamic and Islamic religion, law and political thought. The first section focuses on the centuries before Islam, with studies on Mazdakism in Iran and on Islam as the key factor behind the outbreak of Iconoclasm in Byzantium. The second group of studies looks at problems in legal history, including the codification of the Qur'an, while the third investigates questions of political thought, amongst them a study of early Muslim anarchists, and an examination of the authorship of a work ascribed to al-Ghazali.

Patricia Crone (1945 - 2015) was Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.