There were also non-hostile depictions of the Prophet, such as by George Bernard Shaw. Such depictions, however, were peripheral. The dominant Western imagery of Muhammad remains, in Quinn’s words, that of an ‘antichrist and Arab Lucifer’. The 2005 Danish cartoons (in Jyllands-posten) depicting him as a terrorist are thus in line with this established portrayal. The worldwide protest against the cartoons can be seen as a radical contestation of the Western imagery of Muhammad. Notably, the cartoon controversy brought Muhammad to global consciousness. This, however, is seldom matched by a sober comprehension of what his life means to non-Muslims and to more than a billion Muslims across the world. The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, designed for a non-specialist readership, is a rich and timely volume. The book’s strength lies, inter alia, in the terse ways in which it deals with diverse aspects of Muhammad’s life.

The Companion is divided into three parts – ‘Muhammad in His World’, ‘Muhammad in History’, and ‘Muhammad in Memory’ – which contain three, six, and five articles, respectively. In his pithy introduction, Jonathan Brockopp states that the first part discusses Muhammad’s life in his own time, the second dwells on the accounts of his life in the pre-modern era and the final part deals with his representation in modern times. However, he does not explain the logic of this division, and leaves unaddressed the key question of the interrelationships between culture, memory, and history.

The opening chapter by Walid Saleh provides the geographical-cultural ambience in which Muhammad was born. To Saleh, Muhammad did not bring a new message; he simply reaffirmed the Truth of Allah as sent through previous Prophets. His mission was for all humankind, and he was ‘the prophet of mercy’. Uri Rubin says that the Qur’anic (Meccan era) Muhammad is radically different from the one portrayed in sources such as the Qur’anic exegesis (tafsīr), Prophet’s biography (sīra), and Prophetic tradition (hadīth). In his view, the post-Qur’anic sources transformed Muhammad from human messenger to supernatural hero to assert Muslims’ superiority over other religions based on their ‘military’ success at Medina, an unconvincing judgement because such a move ethnicises that which, as Saleh notes, is universal. The subsequent chapter written ‘from a Western historian point of view’, by Michael Lecker, extends this ethnicised approach. His point concerns Muhammad’s stance towards Jews. He does this in the name of ‘solid facts’, ‘valuable evidence’, and ‘the historical Muhammad’. Clearly, history or facts can’t go far enough on their own; it is important to see how contemporary concerns might colour the recourse to ‘history’, ‘evidence’, or ‘sources’.

Part Two begins with Joseph Lowry’s fascinating chapter on the significance and evolution of hadīth as the source of law. He discusses Muslims’ renewed interest in hadīth in modern times, including the Ahl-i-Qur’an movement, which held that the Qur’an alone was eternal and the corpus of hadīth situational. Robert Gleave dwells on Muslims’ emulation of Muhammad in everyday life, ranging from such issues as combing one’s hair to biting one’s nails. Gleave cogently addresses the theological debates over what is properly emulative. In one of the best chapters, Carl Ernst, contra Rubin and Lecker, depicts how many Muslims saw Muhammad as ‘the primordial light’ through which Allah created the universe. By describing the aesthetics of the Prophet, such as beauty, Ernst explains Muslims’ intimacy towards him. Marion Katz deftly describes how Muhammad serves as the reference points in rituals such as prayer, hajj, and mawlīd, celebrations of the Prophet’s birth. Frank Griffel succinctly describes how Muslim philosophers – Al-Farabi, Ibn Sīna, and Al-Ghazali – offered a rational explanation of prophecy using Greek philosophical, especially Aristotelian, templates. In her rich contribution, Asma Afsaruddin describes how principles of precedence (degrees of closeness to Muhammad) and excellence (in doing good and imitating Muhammad – imitatio muhammadi) constituted the core of Islamic notions of just and ethical leadership. She traces the subsequent transformation of these principles in Sunni and Shiite discourses.

Shahzad Bashir’s chapter – the first in Part Three – dwells on the themes of devotion, miracle and belief in the devotional literature of Iran and Central Asia. In the next chapter, John Tolan deals with the West’s hostile symbolisation of Muhammad from the twelfth century to contemporary times. He qualifies by saying that in the last century this depiction began to change. Focusing on Indonesia, Anna Gade discusses recent publications to show Muslims’ engagement with Muhammad. Books such as The Prophet Is Totally COOL (2006) represent the desires and configurations of Muslim lives where Muhammad becomes the model figure in a plural society to surmount differences, to heal the sufferings, to guide students and teachers alike. The last, fine essay by Amir Hussain deals with modern representations of Muhammad in different genres: pictures, songs, novels, and films.

In the epilogue, Abdulkader Tayob situates the Cambridge Companion theoretically. He identifies three processes by which it unpacks Muhammad’s life: transcendentalisation, secularisation, and personalisation (the last one  a bit ambiguous). Given that the categories secular and secularisation have come under serious scrutiny recently, transcendentalisation and secularisation are perhaps less helpful. The liberal dogma that Weberian rationalism is panacea to all ills seems exhausted. After all, many Western accounts of Muhammad as bloodthirsty, beastly and licentious are to a great extent secular imagery nurtured to meet the expanding imperial prerequisites. Thus, it is secular and ethnicised. In my view, what is at stake are the twin processes of ethnification and universalisation. Muhammad’s prominence in the global public sphere contains the seeds of his de-ethnification in the form of universalisation to strive towards its full realisation.

Brockopp begins his introduction by stating that if a family doesn’t have a member named Muhammad – ‘the world’s most popular name for boys’ – it would have a relative with his other name: Ahmad. He is right. This reviewer’s name is also Ahmad, and my image of Muhammad is indebted to Altaf Hussain Hali’s 1879 Urdu verse describing him as ‘the one who has received the title of compassion among the prophets’:

He taught loving kindness to human
kind, saying

‘It is the emblem of Muslims that they
bear love to their neighbour’

‘Bestow welfare on them day and night’
‘They desire the same for every human
as they desire from God for them-
selves’.

(Abid Hussain’s translation, with modifications by the reviewer)