Muhammad & the Empires of Faith (Review)
Too late, too tendentious, and too monolithic. Mine it as you please for insights into how 8th and 9th century Muslims remembered their Prophet, but as a source for the historical Muhammad himself? Forget it. Stylised and simplistic a presentation as this may be, it nevertheless captures how many Islamicists view the sira-maghazi literature. Few of course deny that the corpus does contain early material — the so-called Constitution of Medina is a case in point. Yet for many researchers the latter is a (glaring) exception to the rule. Indeed, for the vast majority of the sira-maghazi corpus we instead cannot but despair at the prospect of being able to separate fact from fiction with any degree of certainty. Our quest for the historical Muhammad thus culminates in the vague yet recognizable picture obtained from 7th century evidence: that of an activist, law-giving, prophet who formed a West Arabian community that came to conquer the Near East. No matter that, according to Chas