Images of the Prophet Muhammad: some new books on the Sīra literature

Abstract

With the publication of the ‘Muhammad cartoons’ in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the conflicts that followed in 2006, interest has increased among both Muslims and non-Muslims in the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his biography. Because of the conflict, a growing number of Muslim writers and non-Muslim academic scholars have started to focus on the sources, the historicity, and the portrayal of the life of the Prophet. In order to understand and evaluate the importance, place and function of the so-called Sīra literature, the collective Arabic name for the literary genre that deals with the life of the Prophet Muhammad, it is first essential to have an overview of the basic sources and to understand how this specific genre has developed over the years. An excellent guide and introduction to these intriguing questions is Tarif Khalidi’s monograph, Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam across the Centuries. For example, contrary to Tariq Ramadan’s inside perspective as presented in The Messenger: The Meanings of the Life of Muhammad, Khalidi’s book offers a thorough and critical outline of the Sīra genre by focusing on its internal variations and showing how it has been used by Muslim writers for different purposes. Khalidi stresses that, even though all Muslim writers more or less use the same sources (i.e. the texts produced by Ibn Isḥāq, al-Balādhurī, al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Sa‘d, all dated to the 9th and 10th centuries), the compilers of the biography of Muhammad have collected, edited and selected passages for different reasons. To understand this process, it is vital to stress that biography can be written with many purposes and aims. Khalidi summarize four principal uses or aims of biography: