Muhammad and the Early Believers

The story of Muhammad is important for many reasons. It is the founding story of Islam. Muslim scholars have long used stories of Muhammad’s words and actions (known as the hadith and sunna) to help them interpret the Qur’an. And ordinary Muslims are encouraged to see Muhammad and his family as exemplars of good human lives and to try to pattern their own lives on his/their model. Muslims of every variety are very clear that Muhammad was human, not divine – God’s Prophet, not an emanation of God. But stories of Muhammad and his time are part of the warp and weft of Muslim cultures.

If you want to learn more about the heart of Islam, therefore, a modern biography of Muhammad is a good place to begin. I particularly recommend Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad (2007) and Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (2006). Ramadan is a leading Muslim scholar who teaches at Oxford University, and he is also the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Armstrong is a well-known American scholar of religion and a former nun. Both of them present Muhammad sympathetically but not obsequiously.

Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (2010). This scholarly book is an in-depth study of the origins of Islam – Muhammad and his community of believers, the struggle for leadership after Muhammad died, and the consolidation of Islam as a distinct religious tradition during the Umayyid empire. It argues that Muhammad and his companions saw themselves not as starting something new, but as preaching a return to a religious truth that they believed was known and familiar to both Jews and Christians – in brief, monotheism, a future day of judgment, and the importance of prayer and good works. Muhummad and his contemporaries, Donner points out, rarely used the word muslim to refer to themselves, but instead generally referred to themselves as mu’minun, or believers. I find Donner’s arguments generally persuasive, but this is a book for those with a serious interest in the topic.

See also The Qur’an.

You may also be interested in the text of my talk on A Very Brief History of Islam.