After nearly five decades of writing for the theatre, Arthur Miller continues to have new plays produced on New York and London stages, and the number of revivals of his plays increases annually in professional and academic theatres where they reinvigorate American audiences and enthrall international ones. “No other American dramatist,” writes C. W. E. Bigsby, “has so directly engaged the anxieties and fears, the myths and dreams, of a people desperate to believe in a freedom for which they see ever less evidence. No other American writer has so successfully touched a nerve of the national consciousness” ( A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. 11 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 248). Best known for his stage plays, Miller has also made important contributions to dramatic theory and criticism, and he has written radio and television plays, film scripts, novels, and travel journals. In addition, Miller continues to extend his political activities beyond the stage as he fights for the freedom of artists worldwide. His work still provokes scholarly debate.

Like so many other terms associated with epic, the term 'translation' itself presents varied facets, leading to questions of definition. In its most obvious sense, there is the long sequence of English renderings of epics, presenting their own form of literary history. Then, from the perspective of two and more millennia, we can see that a main characteristic of the original epics is the ability to generate successors. They translate their predecessors in the sense of carrying them forward into new territories. Not only do we recognize influences and lines of descent from epic into other genres (lyric, theatre, novel, opera), but almost without exception both major and minor practitioners of epic have themselves operated with an unusual sense of their ancestors, an acknowledged pietas. This has not only been true of the long line of literary, or secondary, epics. It was true also for the performers of the primary epics, most of whom looked back from their own 'dark' ages to a heroic period many hundreds of years earlier when the tales had originated, at the start of an oral transmission spanning many generations of bards. Those who transmitted the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf, and Mahabharata were both literally and figuratively singing to an Iron Age audience the lays of a lost Bronze Age, with behind it the even more shadowy myths of a Golden Age. Their poems were symbolized in the golden bough, 'so long unseen', that served to unlock a buried past.

I take the epigraph of this chapter from a moment in the first of Ezra Pound's Cantos when Odysseus, having gone to Hades so that he may learn from the dead how he is to find his way home, is greeted by Tiresias, the Theban seer who will show him his future: 'A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?' (I/4). Tiresias's question makes no literal sense (Odysseus has not been to Hades before) but springs instead from a set of textual errors, mistakes deriving from small but significant slips in transcription and translation, and it usefully focuses our attention on crucial characteristics of modern epics. Pound is not speaking or singing this beginning of his epic poem; like all modern epics, the Cantos is pre-eminently a textual production, fundamentally and ostentatiously a product of the library rather than the battlefield, the mead hall, or the court. 'A second time' is Pound's translation of a phrase he found in a Renaissance translation of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus, whose version confuses two similar Greek adjectives: Odysseus's identity shifts, over the course of time, from 'noble' to 'twice-born' or 'double', and Pound turns this epithet into the opening query from the dead seer. But Pound's phrase introduces an idea of more consequence and complexity than any mere characterological insight about Odysseus's birth. Seven lines later in the same canto, interrupting Pound's version of one of the most vividly realized scenes from Homer's Odyssey (Book 11), when Odysseus sees his mother, Anticlea, among the dead, Andreas Divus breaks into Pound's poem.

Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. Its plot revolves around the last twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman, the hard-working sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman whose ideas of professional, public success jar with the realities of his private desires and modest accomplishments. Subtitled “Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem,” the play has a narrative which unwinds largely through Willy Loman’s daydreams, private conversations revealing past family hopes and betrayals, and how those past experiences, commingled with entropic present circumstances, culminate in Willy’s death. Realizing that in death he may provide for his family in ways he never could during his lifetime, Willy commits suicide, hoping that his insurance will grant Biffa “twenty-thousand-dollar” deliverance, an extended period of grace. He hopes the insurance money will somehow expiate, or at least minimize, the guilt which he feels for his affair at the Standish Arms Hotel a lifetime ago. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into filial ambiguity, civic paradox, and philosophic complexity.

Centuries of critical study have established a working consensus regarding the standard components of the classical epic. At the same time, centuries of writers have produced subtle changes and experimental variations so that this venerable genre turns out to be more flexible than academic purists might prefer. As early as Dante, the elevated heritage of the epic managed to survive the insertion of the poet as a participant in the action. Later the definition has been expanded in order to accommodate the prose of Melville and then Joyce, with common seamen or citizens of Dublin as protagonists. Over time the idea of heroic action has undergone serious re-evaluation, and our postmodern age questions the legitimacy of any hierarchical literary canon. Against this fluid background, Derek Walcott published his extended West Indian narrative poem, Omeros, in 1990. Whereas predecessors in the epic field might depend upon a cohesive national, racial, or spiritual framework, Walcott assembles his story out of the detritus of imperial exploitation and colonial neglect. Born on the tiny island of St Lucia in the Lesser Antilles (1930), the mulatto descendant of European masters and African slaves, he writes of fragmented cultures and uprooted peoples dealing with life in their marginalized corner of the world. With such an unpromising point of departure, the initial challenge is in drawing out the relevance of their struggle.

If we think of Arthur Miller’s career as essentially beginning in 1944, with the disastrous Broadway production of The Man Who Had All the Luck, we ignore nearly a decade of playwriting, a decade in which he was shaping his ideas and experimenting with form. Writing as a student at the University of Michigan, he won two prestigious Hopwood Awards and was a runner-up with his third play. He wrote his first, No Villain, in 1936, and followed it with a series of plays in which he tested his skills and explored his response to private and public issues. Not all of them were by any means five-finger exercises. They Too Arise, a version of No Villain, was produced by both a local group and the Chicago division of the Federal Theatre. Even Honors at Dawn and The Great Disobedience, more obviously apprentice work, compare not unfavorably with the products of 1930s radical theatre whose own melodrama frequently matched that of the period. A further play, written in 1939–40, though lost for many years, did finally receive both a radio and a television production nearly fifty years later and was warmly received. The Golden Years, a play which takes place during the conquest of Mexico by Cortés, is a work of considerable subtlety and power which was written in response to the growing power of Hitler.

In a famous essay of 1920 entitled The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács drew a sharp distinction between ancient epic and the modern novel. The genres both sought to represent concrete reality, he maintained, but their perceptions of it were very different. The world of the epic was experienced as homogeneous, a totality of which the hero was part, while in the novel, the world was experienced as fragmentary and, with respect to subjectivity, radically 'other'. The 'blissful' world of Homeric epic was integrated and closed, bounded by the starry heaven, within which gods and humans felt equally at home, even as they struggled among themselves. The heroes of the epic lived through harrowing external adventures, but their inward security was such that their essence could never be seriously threatened. In the eternal world of the epic, the hero 'was the luminous centre', the passive, immobile point around which reality moved. In contrast, the novel - the predominant genre of modernity - recounts an interior adventure in which the solitary hero is alienated from a world that is no longer hospitable. He yearns for integration, but finds it perpetually out of the reach of his desire. The gods have grown silent and the 'world of action loses contact with that of the self, leaving man empty and powerless, unable to grasp the real meaning of his deeds'. The hero of the novel is alone; an unbridgeable gap separates him from all others in a universe vastly expanded and no longer intelligible. The novel represents the 'epic of a world from which God has departed'.

The name 'Epic of Gilgamesh' is given to the Babylonian poem that tells the deeds of Gilgamesh, the greatest king and mightiest hero of ancient Mesopotamian legend. The poem falls into the category 'epic' because it is a long narrative poem of heroic content and has the seriousness and pathos that have sometimes been identified as markers of epic. Some early Assyriologists, when nationalism was a potent political force, characterized it as the 'national epic' of Babylonia, but this notion has deservedly lapsed. The poem's subject is not the establishment of a Babylonian nation nor an episode in that nation's history, but the vain quest of a man to escape his mortality. In its final and best-preserved version it is a sombre meditation on the human condition. The glorious exploits it tells are motivated by individual human predicaments, especially desire for fame and horror of death. The emotional struggles related in the story of Gilgamesh are those of no collective group but of the individual. Among its timeless themes are the friction between nature and civilization, friendship between men, the place in the universe of gods, kings and mortals, and the misuse of power. The poem speaks to the anxieties and life-experience of a human being, and that is why modern readers find it both profound and enduringly relevant.

In Book II, canto x of The Faerie Queene, Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon - heroes of the poem and Book respectively - settle down to a lengthy sojourn in one of the chambers of Alma's castle. Unusually for The Faerie Queene, however (and, indeed, for the epic tradition more generally), this indulgence is not coded as negative, as the kind of regressive, erotic deviance that typically holds the hero back or delays the successful achievement of his quest. On the contrary, although the two knights are said to be 'burning both with feruent fire' (II.IX.60), the activity that engages them is presented as a wholly legitimate pleasure - the 'naturall desire of countreys state' (II.X.77) - and as a necessary preparation for, if not condition of, their future success. As they immerse themselves in reading the history of their native lands - Arthur, in a book called Briton moniments, Guyon, in a volume entitled Antiquitie of Faerie lond - they learn the dynastic trajectory of their two nations, a trajectory that in both cases culminates in the present moment if not directly in themselves (Arthur's text tells the story of Britain from the Bronze Age up to the reign of his own father, Uther Pendragon; Guyon's, the story of the Faerie dynasty up to 'the fairest Tanaquill', II.X.76, that is, the Faerie Queene whom he serves and whose image he bears on his shield).

Typical for any founder of a global religious tradition, the Prophet Muḥammad has enjoyed unusually high attention from friend, foe, and onlooker. From the beginning, his followers were obviously attentive to his words and deeds but also to his demeanor, and their recollections became critical for the meaning and future of Islam. His foes lost no opportunity to make their own conclusions about him, often cast in their familiar frameworks. And we have also occasionally had observers for whom the event of Muḥammad was sufficient inspiration to record. This volume is a rich collection that presents an examination of all three perspectives on the Prophet of Islam. It includes an extensive discussion of the particular identity, emergence, location, and value of these divergent positions. Covering the beginning of Islam through the premodern periods and up to the most recent debates, the chapters provide an overview of the Prophet Muḥammad, particularly how he has been reflected in word, ritual, philosophical concept, and literary novel. In this epilogue, I interrogate these contributions for their representation of modern scholarship on the Prophet Muḥammad. Not surprisingly, the two major concerns that have preoccupied modern scholarship are both clearly evident here, what I term the history and historiography of the Prophet.

The collections of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muḥammad record his life in the minutest detail, including the Prophet's advice about the benefits of hair care: “The Prophet said: “Combing [one's hair] expels infectious diseases and moisturizing expels misery.” / The Prophet forbade brushing one's hair two times in a day. / The Prophet said, “Good hair is God's kiswa [the cloth covering of the Ka'ba in Mecca] - so treat it with respect.”” / According to most Muslim theologians and jurists, Muḥammad provided the community with an example (sunna). Sunna contains not only stipulations (rules that the community must follow) but also, more generally, advice about the execution of basic life skills, including personal hygiene. The Muslim tradition's assessment of most of the statements and actions described in the foregoing reports (and many other descriptions of everyday actions) is that they do not, in themselves, give rise to formal religious obligations (wājibāt). Believers who do not follow the Prophet's regulations (and, say, brush their hair more than twice a day) are not committing a major sin or misdemeanor. They are, however, missing out on a chance to perform acts of personal piety.

To understand Muḥammad's active presence in Muslim societies over the centuries is, in considerable part, a matter of trying to interpret narratives of miracles, dreams, trances, and other such phenomena that reside outside the purview of ordinary perception. Materials of this nature are available in great abundance in works penned by Ṣūfī Muslims because of their investment in the idea of an esoteric counterpart to the physical universe that is accessible to the spiritual elect. This is evident most prominently in Ṣūfī hagiography, a genre that began with the establishment of the first Ṣūfī communities in early Islamic centuries and continued to expand throughout the Middle Ages as Ṣūfī ideas gained greater currency across various Muslim societies. Saintly figures encountering Muḥammad in the esoteric world (bāṭin) is a familiar trope in this vast literature, usually aimed to establish a protagonist as an heir to the Prophet. Although this is a pattern relevant for the beliefs of many different Muslim groups, for medieval Ṣūfīs, encountering the Prophet in dreams and visions was an especially significant component in putting forth their claims of religious authority.

Rasul Emang COOL (The Prophet Is Totally COOL) is an Indonesian book for children by an author named Bambang Q-Anees. It was published in 2006 by DAR! Mizan, a division of a well-known publisher, the Mizan Group. The book's title rhymes in spoken Indonesian, and the word emang is slang for the emphatic term memang (“truly,” “certainly,” “for real”). Without breaking the boundaries of its own print medium, Rasul Emang COOL references text messaging and electronic format in its diction, layout, and illustrations, such as a recurring visual theme of computer screens featuring the English words Rasulullah Instant Messages.

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.

In the previous chapter, Walid Saleh describes the many portents from Muḥammad's early life that set the stage for his ultimate role as prophet to Arabia. Such miraculous events are said to have continued throughout the Prophet's life, confirming his mission and demonstrating his personal connection to God. The present chapter looks more closely at the differences between the two major sources for Muḥammad's life, namely the Qur'ān, on the one hand, and the extra-Qur'ānic sources, on the other hand. The latter include the compilations of tafsīr (Qur'ānic exegesis), Sīra (Muḥammad's biography), and ḥadīth (tradition). The comparative analysis will focus on Muḥammad's image as emerging in his Meccan period, which stretches from the moment when he first received revelation, through his first attempts at preaching God's warning and promise to the people of Mecca, and up to their final rejection of him. This rejection resulted in Muḥammad's flight (hijra) to the oasis of Yathrib, later to be known as Medina. When we read the Qur'ānic Meccan passages alone, without benefit of post-Qur'ānic interpretation, Muḥammad emerges as a mortal prophet who still has no miracle other than the Qur'ān, the book he received from God over the last twenty-two years of his life, first in Mecca (610-622 CE) and then in Medina (622-632). Muḥammad appears in these passages as a man who both warns of the oncoming Judgment Day and brings God's message of mercy.

“God and God's angels bless the Prophet. Oh you who have faith, invoke God's peace and blessing upon him.” - Qur'ān 33:56 / We live in a world where, as a 1990 advertisement for a camera famously stated, “image is everything.” This is certainly true of the study of Islam, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States. Prior to that, I would begin my introductory course on Islam with a book about the life of the Prophet Muḥammad. I did this because my students, whether or not they were Muslim, knew very little about the Prophet and the beginnings of Islam. After September 11, my students thought that they knew everything about Islam because of what they had learned through the media, particularly from television news. So I had to begin by teaching them how to understand images, especially images of the Prophet. This focus on images raises a paradox, as Muslims for the most part have been aniconic with respect to visual images of the Prophet Muḥammad. When Muslim artists seek to represent the Prophet in an image, they face a unique set of issues. Mohamed Zakariya, the most famous American Muslim calligrapher, expresses the paradox in this way on his Web site: “How does one describe the indescribable? How does one form an image of that which cannot be portrayed?” In part, Zakariya is referring to a legal ruling against portrayal of the Prophet, but there is also the larger philosophical problem of encompassing the meaning of Muḥammad in a single image.

Muḥammad is the world's most popular name for boys. The king of Morocco, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the president of Egypt are all named Muḥammad, and when the famous boxer Cassius Clay became a Muslim, he was given the name Muhammad Ali. If there is a Muslim family in the world that does not have a brother, grandfather, or uncle named Muḥammad, they almost certainly have a relative who has been given one of the Prophet's other names: Muṣtafā', Aḥmad, or al-Amīn. One also finds the names Muḥammadī (“Muḥammad like”) and Muḥammadayn (“double Muḥammad”). These habits of naming are indicative of a popular devotion to the Prophet that enhances, and in some cases overwhelms, the historical limits of the man who died more than fourteen centuries ago. The fact of this devotion should not surprise. The popular veneration of Muḥammad is quite similar to that offered to Jesus, the Buddha, and countless other religious figures around the world; Yet time and again - whether in reaction to Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses or to cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten - Muslims' reactions in defense of their prophet have caught non-Muslims off guard; There are many reasons for this gap in understanding, but three concern me here. First, although Jesus and the Buddha have overwhelmingly positive reputations in contemporary Western civilization, that of Muḥammad is decidedly more mixed.