

This ruler sends an army to destroy the Ka’aba, and adds a war elephant to the mix. A Christian ruler from the south of Arabia has just built a cathedral and wants to destroy the religious competition of the Ka’aba. I realized the character of this book early on when it provides a tale from the pre-history of Muhammad. Review in short: This book is a reassuring resource for the pious, but has no other value. Instead, they served me a sausage and now I’m demanding to know “But how was this sausage made?!” Metaphorically, I walked into a restaurant for a culinary lesson. And hey, it’s affordable! So I bought the ebook early on to orient myself in an Islamic view of Muhammad and… After all, there’s more than Ibn Ishaq out there.Īny search for information around Muhammad’s biography will bring up results including Muhammad: His Life Based on the Early Sources, by Martin Lings. And while I would like to do both of those things, I’m also starting from a beginner’s place and partly just need an orientation into the early sources. If you want an English translation of Ibn Hisham’s The Life of the Prophet, you’ll have to open your wallets and pay… $76! Or pay the expense and time to become fluent in classical Arabic and get the Arabic edition for upwards of $25. Of course, that resource no longer exists in its original form, and what we have comes to us through Ibn Ishaq’s student, Ibn Hisham. In learning any biographical material about Muhammad, one will invariably hear mention of the first-known biography of Muhammad, The Life of the Prophet by Ibn Ishaq.
