Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time

by Karen Armstrong

Reviewed by Robbie Hudson

From: The Sunday Times,  March 11, 2007

This is a resolutely contemporary book. After observing that the “history of a religious tradition is a continuous dialogue between a transcendent reality and current events in the mundane sphere”, Armstrong points out that Islam, like Christianity, draws heavily on the exemplary life and teachings of one man. She says that it is vital to understand Muhammad’s life in its context, briefly analyses the available sources and delivers a lucid and highly readable biography. Muhammad’s messages from God, his traumatic exile from Mecca and settlement in Medina, along with his political struggle, war with Mecca, and that war’s peaceful resolution, are crisply dealt with. The confident simplicity of the author’s writing belies the clear choices she has made: her Muhammad is a pluralistic monotheist with an enlightened and attractively modern view (to western eyes) of sexual equality, the problems of capitalism and the value of peace. She downplays the difficult, sometimes horrific events that contradict this — ie massacres, taking more wives than he allowed his followers, exiling opposing tribes. It would be easy to dismiss Armstrong’s take as wish-fulfilment and apologia, but the Christian West happily cherry-picks the less problematic lessons from the Bible. Most of us are shamefully ignorant of Muslim history, and Armstrong legitimately portrays a version of Muhammad that could be used as an examplar by a “modern”, tolerant Islam.

MUHAMMAD: Prophet for Our Time

by Karen Armstrong (Harper Perennial £7.99)

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Karen Armstrong discussed her book Muhammad, at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday, March 23, at 12.30pm