Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Muḥammad in his world
- Part II Muḥammad in history
- Part III Muḥammad in memory
- 10 Muḥammad in Ṣūfī eyes: prophetic legitimacy in medieval Iran and Central Asia
- 11 European accounts of Muḥammad’s life
- 12 Religious biography of the Prophet Muḥammad in twenty-first-century Indonesia
- 13 Images of Muḥammad in literature, art, and music
- 14 Epilogue: Muḥammad in the future
- Index of Quaran Verses
- General Index
11 - European accounts of Muḥammad’s life
from Part III - Muḥammad in memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Muḥammad in his world
- Part II Muḥammad in history
- Part III Muḥammad in memory
- 10 Muḥammad in Ṣūfī eyes: prophetic legitimacy in medieval Iran and Central Asia
- 11 European accounts of Muḥammad’s life
- 12 Religious biography of the Prophet Muḥammad in twenty-first-century Indonesia
- 13 Images of Muḥammad in literature, art, and music
- 14 Epilogue: Muḥammad in the future
- Index of Quaran Verses
- General Index
Summary
For centuries, Muḥammad has been at the center of European discourse on Islam. For medieval Crusades chroniclers, he was either a golden idol that the so-called Saracens adored or a shrewd heresiarch who had worked false miracles to seduce the Arabs away from Christianity; both these descriptions made him the root of Saracen error and implicitly justified the Crusade to wrest the Holy Land from Saracen control. Such polemical images, forged in the Middle Ages, proved tenacious; in slightly modified forms, they provided the dominant European discourse on the Prophet through the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, variants of the image of Muḥammad as an impostor have been used to justify European colonialism in Muslim lands and to encourage the work of Christian missionaries. Yet beginning in the eighteenth century, some European authors present the Prophet in a favorable light: as an inspired religious reformer and great legislator. These authors often have had polemical agendas, for example, lambasting Christian intolerance by contrasting it with the tolerance of Muḥammad and his followers. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some scholars have tried to seek out the historical Muḥammad (just as contemporary scholars sought the historical Jesus) behind the hagiographical sources.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad , pp. 226 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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