Download PDF | Jonathan E. Brockopp (editor) - The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (Cambridge Companions to Religion) - Cambridge University Press (2010).
345 Pages
As the Messenger of God, Muhammad stands at the heart of the Islamic religion, revered by Muslims throughout the world. The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad comprises a collection of essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field who are exploring the life and legacy of the Prophet. The book is divided into three parts, the first charting his biography and the milieu into which he was born, the revelation of the Quran, and his role in the early Muslim community.
The second part assesses his legacy as a lawmaker, philosopher, and politician. In the third part, chapters examine how Muhammad has been remembered across history in biography, prose, poetry, and, most recently, in film and fiction. Essays are written to engage and inform students, teachers, and readers coming to the subject for the first time. They will come away with a deeper appreciation of the breadth of the Islamic tradition, of the centrality of the role of the Prophet in that tradition, and, indeed, of what it means to be a Muslim today.
Jonathan E. Brockopp is associate professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. A specialist on early Islamic legal texts, he has written widely on Islamic law, ethics, and comparative religions. His books include Early Malik ¯ ı Law: Ibn ¯ Abd al-Hakam and His Major Compendium of Jurisprudence (2000); Judaism and Islam in Practice: A Sourcebook (2000, coauthored with Jacob Neusner and Tamara Sonn); and two edited volumes on Islamic ethics. His article “Theorizing Charismatic Authority in Early Islamic Law” (2005) advances a new theory for understanding the role of Muhammad in Islamic history
Notes on contributors
Asma Afsaruddin is professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on the religious and political thought of Islam, Quran and ¯ h. adıth¯ , Islamic intellectual history, and gender. She is the author or editor of four books, including Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (2002) and The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008). Afsaruddin is currently completing a book manuscript about competing perspectives on jihad¯ and martyrdom in premodern and modern Islamic thought. Her research has won funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Shahzad Bashir is associate professor of religious studies and Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhsh ¯ ıya between Medieval ¯ and Modern Islam (2003), Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (2005), and the forthcoming Bodies of God’s Friends: Sufis in Persianate Islamic Societies. His current projects involve evaluations of rhetorical strategies utilized in Islamic historical and hagiographical literature.
Jonathan E. Brockopp is associate professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. A specialist on early Islamic legal texts, he has written widely on Islamic law, ethics, and comparative religions. His books include Early Malik ¯ ı Law: Ibn ¯ Abd al-H. akam and His Major Compendium of Jurisprudence (2000), Judaism and Islam in Practice: A Sourcebook (2000, coauthored with Jacob Neusner and Tamara Sonn), and two edited volumes on Islamic ethics. His article “Theorizing Charismatic Authority in Early Islamic Law” (2005) advances a new theory for understanding the role of Muh. ammad in Islamic history. Carl W. Ernst is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of Islam and Sufism. His publications include Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (2003), Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond (2002, coauthored with Bruce Lawrence), and Guide to Sufism (1997). He is now William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Anna M. Gade is a Southeast Asianist who specializes in modern religious and social change in Muslim Asia and is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is author of Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Quran in Indonesia (2004), a study of a revitalization movement in Quranic education and performance based on fieldwork ¯ in South Sulawesi. She has also carried out ethnographic research in Cambodia to explain intersections of religion and development among contemporary Muslims. She recently completed a new book on the Quran.
Robert Gleave is professor of Arabic studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He works mainly in the area of Islamic legal theory (us.ul al-fiqh ¯ ) and in particular the development of Twelver Shı¯ı Law and the theory of legal ¯ interpretation in Islamic law. His books include Inevitable Doubt: Two Theories of Shı¯ı Jurisprudence ¯ (2000) and Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbar¯ ı Sh ¯ ı¯ı School ¯ (2007). His current project is an examination of interpretation and linguistic meaning in Islamic jurisprudence. Frank Griffel is professor of Islamic studies at Yale University, publishing in the fields of Islamic law, Muslim theology, and Muslim intellectual history. In addition to Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam (2000), he is the author of AlGhazal¯ ı’s Philosophical Theology ¯ (2009), a detailed study on the life and thought of the influential Muslim theologian al-Ghazal¯ ı (d. ¯ 1111). In 2007, he received a Carnegie Fellowship to support his current research on the way that Aristotelian philosophy (falsafa) was integrated into Muslim theology. Amir Hussain is professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on world religions. His specialty is the study of Islam, focusing on contemporary Muslim societies in North America. He is active in the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy of Religion (where he is co-chair of the Contemporary Islam Group and serves on the steering committee of the Religion in South Asia Section). He is on the editorial boards of Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life and Comparative Islamic Studies. In 2008, he was made a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. His most recent book is an introduction to Islam for North Americans titled Oil and Water: Two Faiths, One God (2006).
Marion Holmes Katz is associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. She specializes in issues of Islamic law, gender, and ritual. She has written Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (2002) and The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (2007). She is currently working on a history of women’s mosque access. Michael Lecker is professor of Arabic at the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Hebrew University. He is the author of more than three dozen articles on early Islamic history, focusing primarily on the life of Muh. ammad, many of which have been collected in his Jews and Arabs in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia (1998). More recent publications include The “Constitution of Medina”: Muhammad`s First Legal Document (2004) and People, Tribes and Society in Arabia around the Time of Muhammad (2005). For his recent work on prosopography, visit http://michael-lecker.net.
Joseph E. Lowry is associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles on Islamic legal theory and medieval and modern Arabic literature. His books include a coedited volume in memory of George Makdisi, Law and Education in Medieval Islam (2004), and Early Islamic Legal Theory: The Risala ¯ of Muh. ammad ibn Idrıs al-Sh ¯ afi¯ ı¯ (2007). He is currently working on several articles and coediting a volume of studies in Arabic literary biography covering the period from 1350 to 1850. Uri Rubin is professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Tel-Aviv University. His publications on the Quran, Qur ¯ an exegesis ( ¯ tasfır¯ ), and early Islamic tradition (sıra¯ and h. adıth¯ ) include a Hebrew translation of the Quran ( ¯ 2005); The Eye of the Beholder (1995); Between Bible and Quran¯ (1995); and numerous articles on Muh. ammad, Quranic exegesis, the pre-Islamic history of Mecca and the Ka ¯ ba, and the sanctity of Jerusalem as reflected in the Quran and its exegesis. ¯ Walid A. Saleh is associate professor of religion at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Quran and its interpretation ( ¯ tafsır¯ ) and on Islamic apocalyptic literature. He is the author of The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition (2004) and In Defense of the Bible (2008). He is currently working on an introduction to tafsır¯ studies.
Abdulkader Tayob is professor of religious studies at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on the history of religious movements and institutions in South Africa and on the study of religion as a discipline. He now works on Islam and public life in Africa and the contemporary intellectual history of Islam. His publications include the widely used Islam, a Short Introduction (1999); Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams and Sermons (1999); and Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (2009). John V. Tolan works on the history of religious and cultural relations between the Arab and Latin worlds in the Middle Ages. He has taught in universities in North America and Europe and is currently professor of history at the University of Nantes and director of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Ange Guepin. His ´ books include Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (1993), Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008), and Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (2009).
Introduction
Muhammad is the world’s most popular name for boys. The king of Morocco, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the president of Egypt are all named Muhammad, and when the famous boxer Cassius Clay became a Muslim, he was given the name Muhammad Ali. If there is a Muslim family in the world that does not have a brother, grandfather, or uncle named Muhammad, they almost certainly have a relative who has been given one of the Prophet’s other names: Mus.tafa¯, Ah. mad, or al-Amın. One also finds the names Muhammad (“Muhammad like”) and Muhammadayn (“double Muhammad”). These habits of naming are indicative of a popular devotion to the Prophet that enhances, and in some cases overwhelms, the historical limits of the man who died more than fourteen centuries ago. The fact of this devotion should not surprise.
The popular veneration of Muh. ammad is quite similar to that offered to Jesus, the Buddha, and countless other religious figures around the world. Yet time and again – whether in reaction to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses or to cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten – Muslims’ reactions in defense of their prophet have caught non-Muslims off guard. There are many reasons for this gap in understanding, but three concern me here. First, although Jesus and the Buddha have overwhelmingly positive reputations in contemporary Western civilization, that of Muh. ammad is decidedly more mixed. Second, many readers are simply unaware of the breadth and depth of devotion to Muh. ammad in Muslim societies as evidenced in the riches of Persian literary traditions, rituals surrounding the celebration of his birthday, modern poetry, music festivals, and more. But the third, and perhaps most important, reason for this misunderstanding has to do with the unique role of the Prophet Muh. ammad in Islamic religious history.
Muhammad is much more than a man who died more than 1,400 years ago; he is the central animating figure of the Islamic tradition. He is imitated in virtually every act of ritual, leadership, devotion to God, morality, and public comportment. Muslims pray in just the way that Muh. ammad did, and the S.uf¯ ı quest for unity with God is based on ¯ Muh. ammad’s own journey to heaven. Some Muslim men seek to dress and wear their hair as the Prophet did, and some Muslim women seek to dress as did his wives. To carry out these actions, Muslims study the life of their prophet to perfect their own religious practice. But every act of reading is also one of interpretation, and imitation is no rote repetition but a creative adaptation to current circumstances. We could even say that Muslims continue to define Muh. ammad as they reread and apply the events of his life to their own time and place. It is fair to suggest that Muh. ammad would be amazed at the Islam of today. He was an Arab and perceived of himself as a prophet to the Arabs, yet less than a fifth of the world’s Muslims speak Arabic today. Muslim rituals and practices, from Indonesia to the Americas, incorporate tradition and modernity in an almost-bewildering variety.
Yet almost all Muslims use some Arabic phrases in prayer, including recitation of the Quran in its original language, though they may not understand the ¯ meaning of the words. Further, scholars of Muslim history must master the Quran and the earliest Islamic literary sources, all of which ¯ are written in Arabic. To learn about Muhammad, then, first requires an imaginary journey into the time and space of Arabia some fourteen centuries ago. Muhammad was born, lived, and died in Arabia, or more specifically, in the part of western Arabia we call the Hijaz.
This is a strip of ¯ mountains with a coastal plain that parallels the Red Sea and receives a small amount of rainfall (about four inches) each year, just enough to support small animal herds and, in the lowland oases and the highland plateaus, some agriculture. Archeological evidence tells us of lively cultural centers in the south and north of the Arabian Peninsula, but we still have much to learn about the area where Muhammad was born. His hometown of Mecca was probably an important trading town, with a religious cult centering on the Kaba, a shrine that would later become the physical center of Islam. Caravans of camels were apparently organized both north to Syria and south to Yemen, as well as east to Iraq, but local trade was probably also important. The religious world of the H. ijaz likely reflected that of the sur- ¯ rounding regions, where local traditions lived side by side with various forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. What little we know about these local traditions, often called paganism or polytheism, comes largely from later Islamic sources. These inform us that Meccans venerated many different gods and goddesses, some of them representing qualities of strength or of fate, whereas others represented natural forces.
The name Allah was known to them, however, as that of a high god who ¯ had especial control of weather and ships at sea (Q 29:63–5; 31:31–2). As for other religions, it must be recalled that Arabia was quite distant from the centers of those cults, and that Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism were all undergoing significant shifts in their identity during this period. Therefore, the adherents of those traditions, who made their way to the H. ijaz for one reason or another, may have had beliefs and ¯ practices quite different from what we might normally associate with the versions of those religions that have been transmitted to us.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق