290 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0062500144
Ah, Karen Armstrong, former Nun, current scold of all things Christian and Western and excuser of all things Islamic and Eastern. In Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, we get more of the same, as the history of Islam is white-washed (ahem) while the West is excoriated for misunderstanding it. This book swerves from history to political ranting and excuse-making. I was taught that history is not about presenting your information from a biased standpoint, to make things look better than they were, or try to convince you of this history as being right or even wrong; it was about researching the facts and presenting them in an unbiased fashion, though the heavens fall. While Muhammad is not quite a whitewash of the man’s life, it is extraordinarily selective in what it reports and what it ignores (it seems that every time she records a less-than-noble action of Muhammad, she always tries to put the best spin possible on the same). A prime example is of his retreat from his original position of full equality for women in society; the only end view one can take away from Muhammad here is either a henpecked husband leading to his first advocating women’s equality, or a male herd-follower after changing his mind.
Armstrong’s biography is also strongly biased in its lack of criticality; there’s no sense of scholarship in the way of historical-critical wrestling with either the Quran itself or the later Hadith about Muhammad. It must, however, be said that Armstrong is candid about her objective: to make Muhammad and Islam palatable to us Westerners whose “prejudice” has prevented them from honestly assessing one of the world’s great religions. I, for one, am afraid that her objective is likely to be realized, and that lazy American readers will accept her version of Islam as an accurate and “enlightened” view, thereby relieving themselves of the need to actually READ the Quran and other, more objective commentaries on the life of Muhammad.
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