Kirjahaku

This volume comprises articles dealing with qur'anic and post-qur'anic aspects of the Prophet Muhammad's image and religious environment. The pieces in the first section analyse Muhammad's prophecy as reflected in the Qur'an and the post-qur'anic sources of sira (Muhammad's biography), tafsir (Qur'an exegesis), ta'rikh (historiography) and hadith (Muslim tradition). They reveal aspects of the manner in which the post-qur'anic sources have elaborated on the relatively modest qur'anic image of Muhammad for polemical needs as well as due to natural admiration for the prophet of Islam. Articles in the second section study Muhammad's prophetic experience. By concentrating on specific events in Muhammad's life further light can be shed on the post-qur'anic image of Muhammad as developed by the Muslims of the first Islamic era. The articles that comprise the third section look at Muhammad's Arabia, specifically the traditions about Mecca and the Ka`ba as well as at the pre-Islamic Arabian roots of some qur'anic and post-qur'anic ideas and rituals, including the pre-Islamic sacred status of the Ka'ba in relation to that of Jerusalem.

Detailed examination of traditions about Muhammad which illustrate particular themes thought to be part of the biblical prophetic paradigm: attestation, preparation, the experience of revelation, persecution, and "salvation," this last meaning the hijra. The author analyzes the ways in which Muhammad's early biographers sought to shape the Prophet's biography through biblically based, and later Qur'anic, modes of authentication. The author has abandoned the quest for the historical Muhammad because of the impossibility of separating the "real" Muhammad from legends about him. He challenges the notion that earlier traditions about Muhammad are more authentic than later ones, arguing that the moulding of accounts of Muhammad's life according to what were perceived as standard criteria of prophethood began at the outset, as Muslims sought to prove themselves worthy successors to the civilizations of the Jews and the Christians..

This book investigates the literary role played by the Bible in Islamic sources. It focuses on the tension between Biblical and Qur'anic models as revealed in Islamic texts describing contacts between the Muslims and the "Children of Israel", as Jews and Christians are usually called in the context of world history. By adopting the method of his earlier work on the image of the Prophet Muhammad, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims, Rubin examines hadith reports of the first three Islamic centuries that draw on Qura'nic and biblical material. Each of the work's three parts reflects a particular historical attitude toward the Jews and definition of the relationship between Jews and Muslims. This book will be of interest to students of the history and interpretation of the Qur'an and of early Islamic tradition and dogma and early Islamic history, as well as to all those interested in comparative religion and intercultural relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.