by Joel Hayward ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2022
A complex but readable reinterpretation of Muhammad’s role as a warrior prophet.
Renowned military historian Hayward explores the war campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad in this sprawling historical study.
Perhaps no two people have influenced the world quite like Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. And while their religious teachings are similar, Muhammad diverges in his dual role as a “warrior-prophet” who “fought militarily to fulfil [sic] the mission that he believed God had given him.” Central to Hayward’s impetus in writing this book is his belief that contemporary scholarship has inadequately addressed Muhammad’s militarism. Most studies on the prophet, for example, are written by theologians and religious scholars who fail to approach the topic with the methodology of trained historians and thus focus on issues of fiqh (jurisprudence). According to the author, many scholars are also plagued by “present-centeredness” and operate under modern assumptions that condemn warfare or rely on Western tropes that portray “Muhammad as a general” based on contemporary understandings of military organization. Eschewing these historiographic trends that attempt to speak to 21st-century issues, Hayward emphasizes the religious and military context in which Muhammad acted. Divided into three sections, the book begins by placing Muhammad in a historical context in which the “ordinariness of raiding” was the “norm.” A similar contextual approach guides the book’s subsequent sections: “Pitched Battles and Attacks on Settlements” and “Muhammad’s War With the Jews.” Arguing against allegations that Muhammad was antisemitic, the book notes that Jews were “under his sworn protection,” were given “certain freedoms,” and that there were even Jewish “strong warriors” serving as auxiliaries in his Khaybar campaign. Though Hayward is a self-described “committed Muslim,” he is uninterested in presenting religious history or defending Muhammad’s military competence. Instead, as a professor of strategic thought at Rabdan Academy in the United Arab Emirates and author of multiple books on military history, he seeks to further readers’ understanding of “the historical Muhammad” whose military actions are filtered through a seventh-century Arabic mindset. At more than 450 dense pages, the book may be overwhelming to those unfamiliar with Islamic history, though ample reading aids (from maps and charts to timelines and a glossary) are provided. With almost 1,500 endnotes, this is a remarkably well-researched book that has a solid grasp on both contemporary scholarship as well as Arabic primary sources.
A complex but readable reinterpretation of Muhammad’s role as a warrior prophet.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781800119802
Page Count: 457
Publisher: Claritas Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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