I have several books on my Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). The first one, which I bought very many years ago, was Martin Lings's Muhammad - his life based on the earliest sources. It is acclaimed worldwide as the definitive biography of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) in the English Language.
It was first published in 1983 and draws upon eighth- and ninth-century Arabic sources, of which some are translated in the book for the first time. Lings, whose Muslim name is Abu Bakar Siraj al-Din, uses a narrative style that makes the book extremely readable. Take this passage from Chapter Eight, for example, which describes how the fatherless infant Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) becomes a nurseling of the Bedouin woman, Halimah: "So I went and took him, for no reason save that I could find none but him.I carried him back to where our mounts were stationed, and no sooner had I put him in my bosom than my breasts overflowed with milk for him. He drank his fill, and with him his foster-brother drank likewise his fill. Then they both slept; and my husband went to that old she-camel of ours and lo! her udders were full. He milked her and drank of her milk and I drank with him until we could drink no more and our hunger was satisfied. We spent the best of nights, and in the morning my husband said to me: 'By God, Halimah, it is a blessed creature that thou hast taken.'"
Another well-known biography of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) is Muhammad - a biography of the Prophet by Karen Armstrong. She is not a Muslim and was, in fact, a Roman Catholic nun for seven years.
In her introduction, Armstrong observes that "the old hatred of Islam continues to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic and people have few scruples about attacking this religion, even if they know little about it." Indeed, the book's first chapter "traces the history of Western hatred for the Prophet of Islam". In a later chapter, she refers to Islam as "a religion of social justice". In her last paragraph, she quotes Wilfred Cantwell Smith who wrote in 1956 that "the 'fundamental weakness' of both Western civilisation and Christianity in the modern world 'is their inability to recognise that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals.'" She then concludes, "The reality is that Islam and the West share a common tradition. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims have recognised this, but the West cannot accept it... If Muslims need to understand our Western traditions and institutions more thoroughly today, we in the West need to divest ourselves of some of our old prejudice. Perhaps one place to start is with the figure of Muhammad: a complex, passionate man who sometimes did things difficult for us to accept, but who had genius of a profound order and founded a religion and a cultural tradition that was not based on the sword - despite the Western myth - and whose name 'Islam' signifies peace and reconciliation".
An earlier publication in my collection is Muhammad - A Mercy to all the Nations by Al-Hajj Qassim Ali Jairazbhoy, first published in 1937.
In his preface, the author states, "To raise a people sunk in the lowest depths of degradation and vice, and to have the rare fortune of achieving success in his mission in his own lifetime, is decidedly the monumental work of a highly successful character, one to inspire mankind with action, perseverance, patience, and faith. Any other would have despaired of success, would have yielded to the pressure of utterly hostile circumstances, but the Prophet gloriously outlived all struggles, persecutions, temptations, and failures; he was confident of his mission, confident of success, and so he succeeded at last in the very place of persecution, and could confidently say, 'Verily, I have fulfilled my mission.'" The last chapter of the book is of special interest, where the author advances his claim that "all the prophets had prophesied the advent of a world Prophet who should verify the truth of all the prophets who had appeared in the World".
I bought my copy of Rafiq Zakaria's Muhammad and the Quran in 1997 at the London British Museum. Published in 1991, he reveals in his preface that "the idea of writing this book came to me after reading Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Its acclaim by a large number of non-Muslim intellectuals and its popularity, especially after the fatwa by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, convinced me that a fair picture of Islam needed to be presented once again in order to remove much of the distortion that has crept into its perception".
He further states, "The book is not the life story of Muhammad, nor does it give a translation of the whole text of the Quran. It is an attempt to bring out the essentials of what Allah has pronounced and what his Messenger preached and practised... Instead of giving my personal views, I have quoted the studied observations of highly respected persons, both Muslims and non-Muslims; their testimony lends authority to the assessment of the various issues under dispute".
In this book, Rafiq Zakaria has selected 1,111 Quranic verses (out of a total of 6,666) to "reveal the nature and spirit of Islam and bring out clearly its message of monotheism and the consequences of good or bad deeds for this life and the life hereafter". He also covers "the stories of the prophets from Adam to Jesus, as narrated in the Quran... (to) give an illustrative insight into the values that the faithful are asked to emulate".
'Abd al-Rahman 'Azzam, the first secretary-general of the Arab League, first published The Eternal Message of Muhammad in 1954 in the Arabic language. It is deemed a classic study in the Muslim world of the Prophet's (Peace Be Upon Him) Message. Written for a Muslim audience, the author points out in his preface, "My intention in writing the original essays was to clarify for Muslims some of the principles and origins of their society, faith, and revealed Law, and to speak of the life of their Prophet. It was not my intention to apologise or preach to non-Muslims".
'Abd al-Rahman is saddened by the materialism of the West, the idol he terms as 'a high standard of living' to which many, including Muslims, appear to be attracted to. His book is "a serious attempt to point out the Muslim answers to today's world" and focuses on the fundamentals of Muhammad's (Peace Be Upon Him) Message, i.e. faith (Iman) and right-doing (Ihsan). The chapters explore social reform, the Islamic State and international relations, as well as what the author believes to be the causes of world disturbance. On the latter, he states that "extremism in patriotism or national loyalty has been a basic cause of the increase of world disturbances and the gradual expansions of wars from local struggles to universal holocausts".
He asks, in his last chapter, "Why not teach people, therefore, to loathe war as they loathe murder?", and calls upon mankind to return to "the (righteous) way of the prophets, who directed instincts in a manner satisfactory to the standards of virtue and the common welfare".
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