Muhammads Body

Download or read book Muhammad's Body written by Michael Muhammad Knight and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Muhammad: Forty Introductions written by Michael Muhammad Knight and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book Who Is Muhammad? written by Michael Muhammad Knight and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Muhammad's Grave written by Leor Halevi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Fascinating Story of Muhammad written by Ahmad Shameem and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ali Sina, a great expert of Islam, wrote about this book: This is a great book. I read the first thirty pages and I could not stop. This book must be translated in all languages and become available to all Narrating the story in the gripping way of a good novel, it tells about Muhammad, his believer and unbeliever tribal relatives, the Qur'an, and the Arabian society of the period as truthfully and originally as the oldest Arab records make it possible. It does not fail to shock and surprise when one finds that during his twenty-three years of apostolate, Muhammad arranged for banditry raids, secret assassinations, ransom taking, kidnappings, slave trading, ethnic cleansing, inter-tribal wars, and murderous expeditions. Of these raids, the number of well recorded and documented, discussed by the Qur'an itself, is thirty-eight. Muhammad personally took part in twenty-seven raids and battles in nine of which he was directly engaged in killing. These were the battles of Badr, Uhud, Ahzaab, Hunayn, and Ta'if, the massacres of the Qurayza and the Khyber Jews, the surprise raid on the Mustalaq, and the occupation of Mecca. History tells us that many kings started as bandits and came to rule vast territories. If Muhammad had claimed that he was a king, one could place him amongst the greatest of kings but the surprise lies in his claim that he was God's most favourite and final prophet. If prophets were to kill and plunder, sell slaves, hold captives for ransom, allow rape of slave women, and develop systems of extortion, how does one differentiate between a Godly man and a king?

Download or read book Muhammad the Prophet and Arabia written by Uri Rubin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises articles dealing with qur'anic and post-qur'anic aspects of the Prophet Muhammad's image and religious environment. The pieces in the first section analyse Muhammad's prophecy as reflected in the Qur'an and the post-qur'anic sources of sira (Muhammad's biography), tafsir (Qur'an exegesis), ta'rikh (historiography) and hadith (Muslim tradition). They reveal aspects of the manner in which the post-qur'anic sources have elaborated on the relatively modest qur'anic image of Muhammad for polemical needs as well as due to natural admiration for the prophet of Islam. Articles in the second section study Muhammad's prophetic experience. By concentrating on specific events in Muhammad's life further light can be shed on the post-qur'anic image of Muhammad as developed by the Muslims of the first Islamic era. The articles that comprise the third section look at Muhammad's Arabia, specifically the traditions about Mecca and the Ka`ba as well as at the pre-Islamic Arabian roots of some qur'anic and post-qur'anic ideas and rituals, including the pre-Islamic sacred status of the Ka'ba in relation to that of Jerusalem.

Download or read book Did Muhammad Exist? written by Robert Spencer and published by Bombardier Books. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.