The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad

“Typical of any founder of a global religious tradition, the Prophet Muhammad has enjoyed unusually high attention from friend, foe, and onlooker”. Abdulkader Tayob (University of Cape Town) begins the epilogue to this new companion with this comment, and follows it up with a perceptive survey of trends – the central historical and interpretative role of biography in Islamic studies (and above all Muhammad himself), the transcendentalization and personalization of his life, and the engagement of these studies with modernism with all its familiar socio‐political controversies. The companion merits comparison with an earlier work in the same series, on the...