Muhammad's Body
Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Muhammad’s Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad’s body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims’ theories and imaginings about Muhammad’s body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority.
Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad’s relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet’s body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad’s body.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and professor Knight (The Five Percenters) delivers a stimulating academic analysis of writings about the way Muhammad's body supposedly blessed others during his lifetime and after his death. Knight explores a range of overlapping and sometimes contradictory beliefs of what Muhammad's actual physical body is and what it can do. His scholarly dissection of this corpus including biographies of Muhammad and the records of things he said, did, or tacitly approved of shows how some Muslims have regarded the prophet's sweat, hair, fingernails, fluids, eating habits, and encounters with others as means of experiencing Muhammad as a physical channel of divine blessings (baraka). Meticulous and visceral in its treatment of how early Muslims believed Muhammad's body contained the divine, Knight's survey requires sustained attention and careful reading. It is not for those deterred by dense text nor those unfamiliar with the basics of Islamic studies. But those with some background will appreciate Knight's incisive reading of how Islamic tradition has barred certain groups (such as women or theological opponents) from the blessings of Muhammad's body, and he offers fresh insights into Muslim masculinity, esotericism, and power. This is an erudite, provocative tour de force.
