Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

"Brown possesses formidable knowledge of premodern Muslim scholars who sought to preserve accounts of Muhammad’s teachings and practices… MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD sheds light on the considerable dynamism and sophistication within the Sunni tradition.” - The Washington Post

Few things provoke controversy in the modern world like the religion brought by Muhammad. There is alarm over jihad, underage marriage and the threat of amputation or stoning under Shariah law. Sometimes rumor, sometimes based in fact and often misunderstood, the tenets of Islamic law and dogma were not set in the religion’s founding moments. They were developed over centuries by the clerical class of Muslim scholars.

MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD takes the reader back in time through Islamic civilization and traces how and why such controversies developed, offering an inside view into how key and controversial aspects of Islam took shape. From the protests of the Arab Spring to Istanbul at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and from the ochre red walls of Delhi’s great mosques to the trade routes of Islam’s Indian Ocean world, Misquoting Muhammad lays out how Muslim intellectuals have sought to balance reason and revelation, weigh science and religion, and negotiate the truths of scripture amid shifting values.

Jonathan A. C. Brown is an associate professor of Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Understanding in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. His book publications include, among others, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction and Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, and he is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. He lives in Washington, D.C.