Sublime

As was the case with all tribal Shaykhs, Muhammad’s primary function as head of the Ummah was to ensure the protection of every member in his community. This he did through the chief means at his disposal: the Law of Retribution. But while retribution was maintained as a legitimate response to injury, Muhammad urged believers toward forgiveness: “T

Poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and social activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) would come to be known as the…

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Just before 3 p.m., the judges retired to consider their verdict. A few minutes later, they returned to unanimously declare Zafar guilty “of all and every part of the charges preferred against him.” Normally, noted the president, such a verdict would have resulted “in the penalty of death as a traitor and a felon.” Thanks, however, to Hodson’s guar

Added to this group is the Shi‘ite school of law founded by Ja‘far as-Sadiq (d. 765), which will be dealt with in the following chapter. The

After having lived a monogamous life with Khadija for more than twenty-five years, Muhammad, in the course of ten years in Yathrib, married nine different women. With very few exceptions, these marriages were not sexual unions but political ones. This is not to say that Muhammad was uninterested in sex; on the contrary, the traditions present him a

In response to the various charges, Zafar offered only a single, short but strikingly coherent written defence in Urdu, denying that he had any connection with the Uprising and maintaining that he had all along been the helpless prisoner of the sepoys. “I had no intelligence on the subject previous to the day of the outbreak,” read Zafar’s statemen

“The natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful Lord, and so he is, I suppose.”33 As his coronation portrait described him, he was “His Divine Highness, Caliph of the Age, Padshah as Glorious as Jamshed, He who is Surrounded by Hosts of Angels, Shadow of God, Refuge of Islam, Protector of the Mohammedan Religion, Offspring of the Hou

Muhammad’s role during those first couple of years in Yathrib was very likely that of a Hakam—albeit a powerful and divinely inspired one—whose arbitration was restricted to the Aws and Khazraj, and whose authority as a Shaykh was confined to his own “clan” of Emigrants: one clan out of many; one Shaykh out of many. Muhammad’s claim to be the Messe

As far as Muhammad was concerned, the Jews and the Christians were “People of the Book” (ahl al-Kitab), spiritual cousins who, as opposed to the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, worshipped the same God, read the same scriptures, and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community. Although each faith comprised its own distinct religious commu