Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources

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The story is easy to follow partly because of Barrett's clear voice but mostly because of the simplicity of the narrative.

In 1991, a second revised edition of the book with 22 additional pages was published, containing additional details pertaining to Muhammad's endeavours as well as accounts covering the spread of Islam into Syria and its neighbouring states surrounding the Arabian Peninsula. He went on to become an influential member of Western Muslim society, participating in several international Islamic councils and conferences, including acting as consultant to the World of Islam Festival Trust. He put them off with a conciliatory answer; but when they saw that he had done nothing they came to him again and said: "O Abu Talib, thine is a high and honorable position amongst us, and we have asked thee to hold in check thy brother's son, but thou hast not done so.

The author Martin Lings was a Muslim convert and Arabic speaker who spent formative years in Cairo and earned a Ph. The young Lings gained an introduction to travelling at a young age, spending significant time in the United States due to his father's employment.

In 1990, after the book had attracted the attention of Azhar University, Lings received a decoration from Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.He points out that the book was based on the earliest Islamic sources, and where there is a difference of opinion in those sources, the book takes the most widely accepted view; and that Lings simply accepts the early Islamic sources without discussing their value. I look forward to reading this to my kids Insha' Allah but in the meantime, I'll definitely read it again with a highlighter and notepad ready, and recommend it to others also.

I really liked the narrative structure of this book, as well as the relative wealth of information included for a single volume, but I did have a few nitpicks about it. You will remember the treatment Muhammad gave Al-Nadr, the poet who accused Muhammad of retelling ancient tales and who mocked him. While he certainly had a positive reputation amongst his people, due to his manners and his tribe affiliation, people began to seriously take note of him at the age of 40. Williams, Rebecca, Sira, Modern English, in Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God (2 vols.In 1983, the book was selected as the best biography of Muhammad in English at the National Seerat Conference in Islamabad. Cairo became his home for over a decade; he became an English teacher at the University of Cairo and produced Shakespeare plays annually. Hamza Yusuf hails this work as "one of the great biographies of the English language," praising "the historical accuracy of the text and the providential care so evident in the author's choice of versions as well as the underlying structure of the story as he chose to tell it. Doctrinally, Muhammad becomes the symbolic Universal Human – the single universal exemplar of how to live the good life. I just want to make sure I’m reading something that has good information in it and I don’t really want to ask an everyday Muslim.