Muhammad's Body
Muhammad's Body

Author: Michael Muhammad Knight

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1469658925

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Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.

Muhammad: Forty Introductions
Muhammad: Forty Introductions

Author: Michael Muhammad Knight

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1593761678

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"More than a survey of the prophet’s life and times, this book is an introduction to the stunning diversity of Islam and the ways in which Muslims think, dream, and make Muhammad into their very own prophet." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) He ranks among the most venerated historical figures in the world, as well as among the most contested. Muhammad: Forty Introductions offers a distinct and nuanced take on the life and teachings of the prophet Muhammad, using a traditional genre of Islamic literature called the forty hadiths collection. Hadiths are the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad that have been collected by the tens of thousands throughout Islamic history. There is a tradition in which Muslim scholars take from this vast textual ocean to compile their own smaller collections of forty hadiths, an act of curation that allows them to present their particular understanding of Muhammad’s legacy and the essential points of Islam. Here, Michael Muhammad Knight offers forty narrations that provide windows into the diverse ways in which Muslims envision Muhammad. He also examines his own relationship to Muslim traditions while exploring such topics as law, mysticism, sectarianism, gender, and sexuality. By revealing the Prophet to be an ongoing construction, he carefully unravels notions about Islam’s center and margins.

Who Is Muhammad?
Who Is Muhammad?

Author: Michael Muhammad Knight

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-10-25

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1469675420

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Combining insights from the best published historical and religious studies scholarship, original research, and rich first-person perspective, this highly readable book offers a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the founder and central figure of the Islamic tradition: the prophet Muhammad. Narrating Muhammad's life story, teachings, and daily practices, and assessing how his legacy is received, interpreted, and applied around the world, Michael Muhammad Knight reveals how the prophet has become simultaneously one of the most beloved historical figures in the world and also one of the most contested, challenged, and disparaged. Knight argues that there was never a singular Muslim vision of Muhammad but rather always multiple perspectives. While Muslims defend Muhammad's legacy against Islamophobic polemics, they also challenge each other regarding the proper authorities through which Muhammad's life and message become comprehensible and applicable in our world. Thinking across time and place, Knight argues that Muhammad is always contextual and contemporary.

Muhammad's Grave
Muhammad's Grave

Author: Leor Halevi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0231137435

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In this probing study of death rites, Leor Halevi plays prescriptive texts against material culture, advancing a new way of interpreting the origins of Islam. He shows how religious scholars produced codes of funerary law to create new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic from Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian rites; and they changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately. Each chapter explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. Highlighting economic and political factors, as well as key religious and sexual divisions, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve its own distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

A History of the Apocalypse
A History of the Apocalypse

Author: Catalin Negru

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 1387911163

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Every generation of people think that their problems are the most important ever. As history flows without interruption and doomsday scenarios fail, the following generations focus on their own contemporary events, ignoring or underestimating the past. In this way people always see "signs" in their times and the end of the world is constantly a fresh subject.

The Lives of Muhammad
The Lives of Muhammad

Author: Kecia Ali

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674050606

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Kecia Ali delves into the many ways the Prophet’s life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, she shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent.

Did Muhammad Exist?
Did Muhammad Exist?

Author: Robert Spencer

Publisher: Bombardier Books

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1642938548

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Is there any sound historical evidence that the prophet of Islam actually existed, or is the entire story of Muhammad fable or fiction? It is a question that few have thought—or dared—to ask. Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived as a prophet, as well as a political and military leader, in seventh-century Arabia. But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination. In his blockbuster New York Times bestseller The Truth about Muhammad, historian and Islam expert Robert Spencer revealed the often shocking contents of Islamic teachings about Muhammad. Now, in this newly revised and expanded version of Did Muhammad Exist?, he lays bare those teachings’ surprisingly shaky historical foundations. This updated and enlarged version of this acclaimed book examines even more striking and compelling evidence that the story of Muhammad, who for so long was assumed to have lived in the “full light of history,” could be more myth and legend than historical fact. Spencer meticulously examines historical records and archaeological findings, pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what we can know about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the early days of Islam. The evidence he presents challenges the most fundamental assumptions about Islam’s origins.

The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology
The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology

Author: Christiane Gruber

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9783110312386

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By crossing disciplinary boundaries in the field of the humanities, this volume aims to elucidate Muhammad s visualization in the West vis-a-vis his image in Islam. It does so not by relegating materials to geographical and/or linguistic spheres or by separating texts from images. Rather, it seeks to place various articles in thematic and theoretical conversation so as to explore more broadly how the Prophet has been constructed, visualized, narrated, encountered, revised, adapted, and adopted in multiple cultural traditions, in European and American traditions and in the world of Islam from the medieval era until the modern period."

Sufis and Saints' Bodies
Sufis and Saints' Bodies

Author: Scott Kugle

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0807872776

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Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.

Across the Worlds of Islam
Across the Worlds of Islam

Author: Edward E. Curtis IV

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 023155852X

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Muslim people are found all over the world. Most live outside the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. The vast majority of contemporary Muslims are not fluent in Arabic, and speakers of languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Turkish have made essential contributions to Islamic history and culture. However, typical courses on Islam tend to downplay areas beyond the Middle East, focusing on Arabic texts and elite theological and doctrinal arguments. This book offers an inclusive view of the diversity and complexity of the many worlds of Islam, investigating ethics and aesthetics as much as scriptures and theology. By paying attention to Muslims who are socially, culturally, doctrinally, or politically marginalized, it provides a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. Contributors from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds explore the capaciousness of Muslim identities, helping readers achieve a broader understanding of the past, present, and future of the Muslim world. This book includes communities such as the Nation of Islam and Alevi Muslims, and it goes beyond rituals like prayer and fasting to consider a wider array of practices, such as tattooing. Across the Worlds of Islam is at once student-friendly and cutting-edge, written with both introductory courses and general readers in mind. Examining Muslim identity and practice from the perspective of the margins, it offers nuanced portraits of Muslim life across geographic and sectarian divisions.