Muhammad and the Origins of Islam

Peters sets out to reconstruct a biography of Muhammad. This is a difficult task, primarily because of the dearth of straightforward historical records and because of Islamic tradition. For Muslims, while Muhammad is venerated, he is not deified; his words, believed to be the received words of God, are more important than the details of his life. Moreover, early Muslims labelled the time before Muhammad's revelation the Era of Ignorance, "and thus the older religious traditions of Mecca were to a large extent rewritten, or misrepresented, or simply forgotten in the light of a new revelation that had annulled the beliefs and practices of an earlier age" (105).

Yet Peters has been able to construct a context and details,

. . .
s so concerned with filling in the gaps in his own knowledge that he neglects to provide some of the more fundamental information that might make his text more generally useful. One of the book's strengths, however, is the picture it paints of the dusty little backwater town in which Muhammad was born. Mecca has become the holiest place in Islam, but, Peters point out, it started as an unlikely and inhospitable place for a settlement: "Many places in the near vicinity of Mecca, Ta'if, for example, had better soil, more water, and a better climate. What Mecca possessed and they did not, though we cannot explain how or why, was an intrinsic holiness" (24). While Islamic tradition has attempted to turn pre-Muslim Mecca into an oasis along important trade routes, Peters convincingly argues that it was not geographically well favored or well situated. Peters' language tends occasionally toward the esoteric. He uses Latin phrases [i.e., "But there is also a kind of apparatus in pectore as well" (xii)] in some passages, which tends to make his writing unnecessarily elitist. Yet he is also capable of poetic writing, such as in his description of the Syrian steppes at the beginning of Chapter 2, passages that give a rich picture
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 1326
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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