This volume brings together twelve articles by Patricia Crone. 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 section 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.