We headed north today, to prepare to celebrate Eid with family in Melaka. I should find the peace and quiet I need here to complete my Ramadhan reading and move on.
It was quite a relief to turn to Karen Armstrong's Muhammad - A Western Attempt To Understand Islam after dealing with the gratuitous misunderstandings of any kind of religious sensibility in The God Delusion. Yet an agnostic reading of the Prophet's life (peace be upon him) is not difficult to sustain from the writer's treatment of her material. She manages this without upsetting a Muslim readership (the book is frequently made available in bookshops catering to a Muslim readership) simply by treating her subject with understanding, sympathy and admiration. I'm baffled by anyone unable to bring these qualities to the subject, since this man's life would seem to demand such a response from any sensible reader, but it is nonetheless a relief to actually find them, since they are so obviously missing from so many whom you would have thought should know otherwise.
Ms Armstrong is supremely good at dealing with the religious experience of others in the context from which it emerges. She avoids importing judgements from the outside, or other alien sensibilities. A simple example: it's remarkable how the Prophet's success in Medinah manages to upset so many of his less sympathetic biographers. It's as if the sign of a true mission must be some kind of failure in this world. So the Messenger's stunning success, an indication to Muslims of his authenticity, is taken as quite the opposite, a compromising of himself and the Message.
What is fascinating to this biographer, and this blogger, is the way success was achieved in this world through an application of the essentials of the Message. It is as if we have a religion that is of this world, and triumphantly so. Whatever else, it seems to me that what took place in Arabia just over fourteen hundred years ago was something quite extraordinary in human history and worth our close attention if only for that reason.
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