It's Complicated

16 Ramadhan, 1442

The difficulty facing any reader of a biography of the Prophet - peace be upon him - is in trying to keep up with the incredible complications involved in his leadership of the first Muslim community in Medina - which was, of course, not an exclusively Muslim community by any stretch of the imagination. The developing Message had to be applied to real world circumstances which are, as we all know, messy and ambiguous, even in fairly simple organisations, never mind entire cities and beyond. And all this in the face of possible, even likely, annihilation.

When I first encountered this astonishing narrative I found trying to keep up with the complexities of it both hard-going and fascinating at the same time (a bit like life itself.) Tariq Ramadhan does a fine job of simplifying the story by focusing on key episodes or thematic links to illuminate the events, or, rather, to illustrate how the leadership involved illuminated all aspects of the reality it had to deal with.

I suppose I must have read material related to the visit of the Najran Christians to Medina previously, but I'd never quite taken in its significance which is beautifully outlined in TR's account. He associates one of my favourite Qur'anic verses with the episode: Oh humankind! We created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other. The gloss on the Arabic form related to knowing is particularly acute - taarafu expresses mutual knowledge based on a horizontal, equal relationship.

Salutary reading for fanatics of all stripes.