Muhammad: Muhawala li-Fahm al-Sira al-Nabawiyya

Muhammad: Muhawala li-Fahm al-Sira al-Nabawiyya ("Muhammad: An Attempt to Understand the Prophet's Biography") is a book by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud; the copy used here is the fifth edition from Dar al-Ma'arif, Cairo, legal deposit number 1985/4792 ^{4 5}. What follows sets out the author's views, attributed to him.

By its table of contents the book has five chapters: Muhammad; Not greatness but prophethood; A radiant, captivating spirit; A march like a hurricane; Muhammad, the maker of men ⁶.

The author opens by saying that in the twentieth century time has returned "to its first state" and that the jahiliyya has again wrapped people round, a jahiliyya he calls "denser and coarser" than the first ⁷. He refers to al-Baqara, verse 213 when speaking of mankind as one community ⁷.

In this age, he writes, "a new kind of sira book has appeared" that strips the Prophet of the unseen; some of it made him "something like Guevara" and Islam something like a social revolution ¹, or spoke of him as one speaks of Abraham Lincoln ⁸. He calls this a shortsighted understanding, because "the essence of prophethood is not reform or building" ⁸ but "the mysterious link with God and His hidden unseen", an in-between (barzakh) state between nature and what lies beyond it ³.

He distinguishes three figures. The prophet receives from his Lord "the word, the law and the charge" and is protected from error; the saint has only "a moment of transparency", fleeting, with no protection from error, no charge and no mission to convey; the social reformer is a person of personal effort like us, who errs and is right and never leaves the realm of the senses ^{2 8}. He cites al-Kahf, verse 110 for the Prophet's humanity together with revelation ², and al-Baqara and al-Nisa', verse 136 on belief in the unseen ⁸.

Genius, he argues, is excelling in a single quality, while the meeting of every perfection in one person is "a miracle, not genius"; he calls this "my proof of Muhammad's prophethood" and repeats: "we are not, then, before Abraham Lincoln, nor before Guevara" ⁹.

The edition ends with a list of fifty-four of the author's books, which records that his novel Rajul taht al-sifr ("A Man Below Zero") won the State Prize for 1970 and that his complete works were published in Beirut in 1972 ⁵. See Mostafa Mahmoud and The Qur'an: An Attempt at a Modern Understanding.

• Citations use PDF page numbers; printed page = PDF page − 2.
• The fifth edition is undated on its title page; deposit number 1985/4792 gives the approximate year of the printing. The year of the first edition is not given in this file.