Description
The first edition of this book appeared on the 28th of December 2013, titled, "The Fascinating Story of Muhammad." It was well received and reviewed on Amazon with forty-nine percent of the readers giving it five stars and fifty-one percent giving three stars. There were no adverse reviews. Two reviewers stated the following:
A most detailed and authenticated account of Prophet Muhammad's life: A most detailed and authenticated account of Prophet Muhammad's life with supportive verses from the Koran. Very interesting to read. I started reading it and could not put it down. It also includes the history of the four caliphs and a short summary of the Omayyad and Abbasid rule and the impact of the Arab Islamic Empire on the world. (Andy)
Fascinating: Very interesting detail of the life of Muhammad with good references. The book could have been split into different chapters. This book will give the reader a view of what really happened during the time. Discussion in the appendix is very interesting. Would look forward to read more books of the writer. (Abdul Alam)
Following the above suggestion, the second edition of the book has been arranged in chapters.
Introduction:
With verses about Muhammad's personal life, quarrels with his wives, love affair and marriage with the wife of his foster son, taunts and curses aimed at his uncle Abu Lahab and other relatives, banditry raids for booty and slaves, the Qur'an looks more like a Bedouin warlord's story than a "holy book." But then, Muhammad added to it large pieces of Biblical scriptures. In pre-Islamic multi-cultural secular Arabia, people told these Biblical stories to each other orally because it was hard to find written copies. From age twenty-five to forty, living off his older wife Khadijah's wealth, Muhammad learnt these from local scholars of Bible and Torah. Then he reshaped them to suit his own designs; see his Qur'anic verses about Mary, Joseph, Jonah, Abraham, the Israelites, Lot and Noah. Pilfering from Judaism and Christianity, he made his own religion and the Qur'an to look like an extension of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Muhammad prayed with the aboriginal Jews of Medina facing Jerusalem for sixteen months and used the Torah for guidance but, having failed to convince them that he was their last prophet, he lost all restraint, exiled and massacred their men, took over their houses and farmlands, and sold their women and children as slaves. Obsessed with power and conquests under the cover of religious piety, he resorted to the use of both secret and open assassinations, kidnapping for ransom, banditry raids, slave trading, ethnic cleansing and inter-tribal wars. A psychopath, unable to appreciate even basic morality, he proclaimed himself "God's last prophet and attester of all prophets." Then he instructed Muslims to pray to God "to grant him and his progeny the same divine status as Abraham and his progeny had." Devout Muslims still repeat this prayer five times a day, aspiring to do what he did. Hence the terrorism and anti-Semitism.
The Arab histories, written in the 7th and 8th centuries by al Waqidi, al Tibri, Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Husham, and Ibn Sa'ad, supported by verses of the Qur'an, are greatly differentiable in length and analyses from the modern Islamic propaganda history. The Islamists teach short, purged, and grossly exaggerated versions to produce preachers, jihadis, and propagandists to spread Islam. However, the earliest histories, based on hundreds of thousands of meticulously gathered reports of the people of the period, and contemporary poetry and prose provide a much more detailed and realistic account. Ibn Ishaq in particular travelled widely to collect accounts from those who had witnessed the events or learned about them from Muhammad's contemporaries. Over decades, he painstakingly gathered information and wrote it.
This book is based on these earliest sources.
