Complications

5 Ramadhan 1431

I finished Professor Ramadan's The Messenger this morning. The final pages were particularly moving.

One of the many things that the book does particularly well is to make clear sense of the increasingly complicated politics of the final years of the Prophet - peace be upon him. It does so by avoiding the nitty gritty detail and simply painting the broad picture. In the process it captures the absolute integrity of the Prophet's years of what I suppose we might call power, though this is power operating in a very different sense than the one we are used to.

This sense of Islam functioning in the real, messy world of men and women and their drives and desires is something I find extraordinary in the true sense of the word. This is why Muslims inevitably find themselves looking back to a model of human society and behaviour that they believe cannot be bettered. Yet it was real and, thus, the lessons we can learn from it give access to extraordinary possibilities.