"A ... history that brings to life the fascinating and complex world of the Prophet, Muhammad is the story of how peace is the rule and not the exception for one of the world's most practiced religions."--Jacket.

"An accessible and fresh biography boldly arguing that Muhammad's entrepreneurial mindset helped unleash the modern world. 'A beautifully written, immaculately researched meditation on the impact of the Prophet Muhammad on the modern world. I loved this book!' -Reza Aslan, author of No God but God and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. A six-year-old cries in his mother's arms as she draws her last breaths to urge him: 'Muhammad, be...

Few things provoke controversy in the modern world like the religion brought by Muhammad. There is alarm over jihad, underage marriage and the threat of amputation or stoning under Shariah law. Sometimes rumor, sometimes based in fact and often misunderstood, the tenets of Islamic law and dogma were not set in the religion's founding moments. They were developed over centuries by the clerical class of Muslim scholars. MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD takes the...

"It is one of the more startling facts of military history that the founders of three of the four "great religions" -- Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam-- were also accomplished field generals with extensive experience in commanding men in battle. One of these, Muhammed, fought eight battles and was wounded twice, once almost fatally. Another, Siddhartha Gautama (later to become the Buddah), witnessed so much battlefield carnage that he suffered a psychological...

"Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religio-cultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the immense variety of questions and depictions early followers produced regarding Muhammad's sacred power (baraka)-its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, he shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people...