A review by konain
Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings

3.0

A good book. A painstaking work. But a word of caution. "Earliest" sources are still more than a couple of centuries after Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and are likely full of errors, inconsistencies and falsehoods. Many of the sources used by Lings did not conform to that kind of scrutiny that was the hallmark of major writers of hadiths. As a result we find a number of miracles throughout, although the only miracle Prophet Muhammad SAW emphasised and cared about was the Qur'an. It was still OK, but some sequences that really bothered me are those that were exaggerated and used by the earliest Islamophobes to bad mouth the Prophet. So. Read it with a pinch of salt. And don't, if you haven't read a few of better biographies before.