Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam.

• Author: Grasso, Valentina A.

Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam. By SEAN WILLIAM ANTHONY. Oakland, CA: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2020. Pp. xiv + 287. $32.95, [pounds strling]26.

"A very large number of biographies of the Prophet of Islam have been written, several of these in the last few years. Some of these works are good, some even excellent. What good is it to tell the same story once more then? I am certainly not discussing any new tacts. It would be difficult to do so, as no new source has been discovered and it is unlikely that any will be discovered." These lines could have been the incipit of Sean Anthony's most recent labor, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam, but they are not. The passage was written in 1961 by Maxime Rodinson and is found in the "Avant-propos" of Mohammed, Whereas Mohammed became an indelible milestone for Islamic Studies curricula in the West, it was banned by the Egyptian minister for higher education. It is unlikely that Muhammad and the Empires of Faith will be banned by any educational organization, yet Anthony's new publication has all it takes to become another milestone for Islamic Studies curricula.

Anthony states in the introduction ("The Making of the Historical Muhammad," pp. 1-21) that his book focuses on the formative phase and the historical context of literature (biographies of Muhammad). Anthony aims to demonstrate how the sTra-maghdzt corpus relates to other "complementary. rather than mutually antagonistic" sources by situating it in the late antique world. As such, he sets among his primary goals to "revitalize historical research into the life and times of Muhammad," comparing early Arabic with sixth- and eighth-century non-Muslim sources. Moreover, he articulates his intention to "shed new light on the historical circumstances and the intellectual currents that gave rise to the sTrah-maghdzi tradition as a discrete genre of Arabic letters" (p. 1). Indeed, the book is as much about the "making" of the historical Muhammad as it is about the making of the historical stramaghazT literature. A disclaimer is warranted: Muhammad and the Empires of Faith is not about what Anthony accomplishes by "investigating the historical Muhammad," but about what can be accomplished. By "using historical methods and close readings of our earliest source-texts" (p. 1), Anthony successfully accomplishes his objectives. In doing so, he counters the widespread...