Skip to main content
Read page text
page 6
c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Piers Brendon. His books include The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Eminent Elizabethans was published by Cape last year. Christena Appleyard is a freelance editor, writer and retail activist. Michael Arditti’s latest novel, The Breath of Night, was published by Arcadia in July. Stephen Bates is a former religious affairs correspondent of The Guardian. Mark Bostridge’s The Fateful Year: England 1914 is published in January by Viking. Jerry Brotton’s most recent book is A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Penguin). Andrew Brown wrote about sociobiological controversies in his book The Darwin Wars. Rupert Christiansen writes about music and the arts for the Daily Telegraph. David Collard contributed to W H Auden in Context, published this year by CUP. William Doino Jr is a contributing editor to Inside the Vatican and a columnist for First Things. John Dugdale is the author of books on Thomas Pynchon and Sam Shepard. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Henrietta Garnett’s most recent book is Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites & Their Muses (Macmillan). David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies. Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (2002), which won the Wolfson Prize. David Gilmour is the biographer of George Curzon and Rudyard Kipling. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Italy. Matthew Green’s Wizard of the Nile is published by Portobello. He is working on a new book about combat veterans tackling PTSD. James Hall is the author of two books on Michelangelo and, most recently, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art. Simon Hammond is a freelance writer. Tim Harris is Professor in European History at Brown University. His books include Politics under the Later Stuarts. Nick Hayes is a cartoonist and the author of The Rime of the Modern Mariner (Cape). Robert Irwin’s most recent book is Memoirs of a Dervish. Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek poet and writer who has lived in the UK since he fled Uzbekistan in 1992. His novel The Railway was published in English in 2006. Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published last month, as was his Kindle Single Darwin’s Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. Nigel Jones’s 1914: Peace & War will be published next year by Head of Zeus. Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). James Kidd is a freelance writer and the cohost of the Lit Bits literary podcast. Jeremy Lewis is currently at work on a biography of David Astor. Andrew Lycett’s most recent book is Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson). Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Jonathan Meades’s Pidgin Snaps (Unbound), a ‘boxette’ of photos, is published this month, as are paperbacks of Museum Without Walls and Pompey. Giles Milton’s most recent book is Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot (Sceptre). Jonathan Mirsky writes about China and tells Jewish jokes. Eric Ormsby’s most recent book is a translation from the Persian of the last work of the 11th-century poet and philosopher Nasir-i Khusraw under the title Between Reason and Revelation (I B Tauris). Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 was published in September. Philip Parker’s The Northman’s Fury: A History of the Viking World will be published by Jonathan Cape in March next year. Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist and editor-in-chief of Arc. Seamus Perry is Chair of the English Faculty Board at the University of Oxford. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Linda Porter’s latest book is Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots. She is currently working on a book on the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars. Gulliver Ralston is Artistic Director of the Brinkburn Festival and Director of Music at the University of Roehampton. Donald Rayfield is currently writing an expanded Russian version of Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia for BSG Press in Moscow. Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII is published by Chatto & Windus. Aaron Rosen is Lecturer in Sacred Traditions and the Arts at King’s, London. He is the author of Imagining Jewish Art (Legenda). Ian Sansom’s most recent books are Paper: An Elegy (2012) and The Norfolk Mystery (2012). Peter Scupham’s Collected Poems are published by Carcanet. Anne Sebba is working on a book about Paris from 1939 to 1949 as seen through women’s eyes. Miranda Seymour’s latest book is Noble Endeavours: The Life of Two Countries, England and Germany, in Many Stories (S&S). Charles Shaar Murray’s biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix are published by Canongate. Joan Smith’s latest book is The Public Woman. John Sweeney’s North Korea Undercover is this month published by Transworld Books. Michael Tanner is a philosopher at Cambridge University, and has been opera critic of The Spectator since 1996. Adrian Tinniswood’s latest book, The Rainborowes, was published by Jonathan Cape in September. Frances Wilson’s most recent publication is How to Survive the Titanic. She is currently writing a book about Thomas De Quincey. Philip Womack is working on his third book for children. Literary Review | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 4
page 7
b i o g r a p h y e r i c ormsb y Making a Prophet The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad By Lesley Hazleton (Atlantic Books 320pp £20) F or a historical personage about whom we seem to know even the homeliest and most mundane details – his espousal of the toothpick for good dental hygiene or his passionate love of cats – the Prophet Muhammad remains an oddly elusive figure. Gone are the confident days of the late 19th century when Ernest Renan could state that of all the founders of religions, Muhammad alone ‘stood in the full light of history’. Renan’s assumption was understandable. The sheer quantity of documentation in Arabic, including not only the Koran itself but the sira, the eighth- and ninth-century ‘biographies’ of the Prophet, and the voluminous canonical collections of the hadith, those sacred traditions reporting his words and deeds, is immense. These sources are notable not only for the abundance of information they contain but also for their vivid specificity: they positively swarm with detail. True, the Koran, the earliest such document and the only one whose authenticity is incontestable, is short on such details, but the scant information it does contain about Muhammad is therefore all the more precious. By contrast, in the hadith we find all manner of telling titbits: for example, that Muhammad considered three things ‘most lovable in this world of yours’, namely, ‘perfume and women and prayer’, though prayer in particular was ‘the apple of his eye’. This neatly captures both his ascetic bent (‘this world of yours’) and his downto-earth humanity; after all, he claimed to be no more than an ‘emissary of God’, in all other respects he was a ‘man like you’. He could be relentless but he could also be tender: when he found a cat sleeping on his cloak, a famously patched and ragged cloak at that, he carefully slit the cloak apart with his sword rather than disturb the presumptuous feline. And he loved to laugh, we are told, to the extent that when he did laugh – admittedly, not often – he did so ‘until his back teeth showed’. These are charming reports; they make a figure remote in time and place startlingly present and credible. But are they true? In The First Muslim, her latest foray into early Islamic history for a popular readership, journalist Lesley Hazleton accepts the traditional Muslim account of Muhammad’s life and mission pretty much as it stands in the sources. She relies heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on the standard English translation of the classical biography by the ninth-century Egyptian author Ibn Hisham (whose sira incorporates and completes an earlier eighth-century account), as well as on the monumental work of the great tenth-century historian and Koran commentator al-Tabari. I note these dates not out of pedantry but to indicate a glaring problem with these sources: the earliest was composed a century after the Prophet’s death in 632 and the latest almost three hundred years after that (al-Tabari died in 923). Even allowing for the fabled tenacity of memory in traditional Muslim culture, not to mention the exemplary critical rigour of both Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari, it seems improbable that either of these narratives could be considered factually accurate in all or even most of their details. Occasionally Hazleton acknowledges this, as when she notes of one episode that ‘all of this is on the side of too good to be true’, but in general she is content to reproduce the traditional and well-hallowed sequence of events. Though she expresses the wish early on to avoid what she aptly terms the ‘deadening pall of circumspection’, she is nothing if not circumspect from start to finish. Circumspection is warranted, of course. This is a volatile topic. For however sceptically scholars – and especially Western scholars such as the great Hungarian Orientalist Ignác Goldziher, who over a century ago cast serious doubt on the historical authenticity of virtually all the hadith literature – may regard the traditional sources, they are sacrosanct to most Muslims. They form the basis of prescribed comportment in all areas of life; they are the foundation of the sunna, Seminarsat theLegatumInstitute, 11CharlesSt,Mayfair Master’s in International Affairs and Diplomacy October 2013-September 2014 A one-year, London-based course of ten evening seminars and individual research examining key issues in global power politics and diplomacy since the Napoleonic Wars, directed by Professor David Armstrong and Professor Richard Langhorne. The ten seminars are led by internationally distinguished experts including: Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former ambassador to Russia, Sir Richard Dearlove, former Head of MI6, Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Foreign Secretary and Bridget Kendall, BBC Diplomatic Correspondent. Each seminar is followed by a private dinner, in the elegant surroundings of the Legatum Institute, at which participants can engage in questioning and argument with the speakers. Examination is by a research dissertation, on an approved topic within the time-frame of the course, of not less than 20,000 words. Others wishing to take part in the programme, but not intending to take the MA degree, may join the course as Associate Students - attending the seminars and dinners, but not submitting for examination. http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ ma/diplomacy-research Course enquiries and applications: Professor David Armstrong david.armstrong@buckingham.ac.uk T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F B U C K I N G H A M LONDON PROGRAMMES The University of Buckingham is ranked in the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13 n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 5

Page Text

View plaintext

c o n t r i b u t o r s

This month’s pulpit is written by Piers Brendon. His books include The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Eminent Elizabethans was published by Cape last year. Christena Appleyard is a freelance editor, writer and retail activist. Michael Arditti’s latest novel, The Breath of Night, was published by Arcadia in July. Stephen Bates is a former religious affairs correspondent of The Guardian. Mark Bostridge’s The Fateful Year: England 1914 is published in January by Viking. Jerry Brotton’s most recent book is A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Penguin). Andrew Brown wrote about sociobiological controversies in his book The Darwin Wars. Rupert Christiansen writes about music and the arts for the Daily Telegraph. David Collard contributed to W H Auden in Context, published this year by CUP. William Doino Jr is a contributing editor to Inside the Vatican and a columnist for First Things. John Dugdale is the author of books on Thomas Pynchon and Sam Shepard. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Henrietta Garnett’s most recent book is Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites & Their Muses (Macmillan). David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies. Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (2002), which won the Wolfson Prize. David Gilmour is the biographer of George Curzon and Rudyard Kipling. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Italy. Matthew Green’s Wizard of the Nile is published by Portobello. He is working on a new book about combat veterans tackling PTSD. James Hall is the author of two books on Michelangelo and, most recently, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art. Simon Hammond is a freelance writer.

Tim Harris is Professor in European History at Brown University. His books include Politics under the Later Stuarts. Nick Hayes is a cartoonist and the author of The Rime of the Modern Mariner (Cape). Robert Irwin’s most recent book is Memoirs of a Dervish. Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek poet and writer who has lived in the UK since he fled Uzbekistan in 1992. His novel The Railway was published in English in 2006. Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published last month, as was his Kindle Single Darwin’s Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. Nigel Jones’s 1914: Peace & War will be published next year by Head of Zeus. Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). James Kidd is a freelance writer and the cohost of the Lit Bits literary podcast. Jeremy Lewis is currently at work on a biography of David Astor. Andrew Lycett’s most recent book is Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson). Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Jonathan Meades’s Pidgin Snaps (Unbound), a ‘boxette’ of photos, is published this month, as are paperbacks of Museum Without Walls and Pompey. Giles Milton’s most recent book is Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot (Sceptre). Jonathan Mirsky writes about China and tells Jewish jokes. Eric Ormsby’s most recent book is a translation from the Persian of the last work of the 11th-century poet and philosopher Nasir-i Khusraw under the title Between Reason and Revelation (I B Tauris). Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 was published in September. Philip Parker’s The Northman’s Fury: A History of the Viking World will be published by Jonathan Cape in March next year.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist and editor-in-chief of Arc. Seamus Perry is Chair of the English Faculty Board at the University of Oxford. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Linda Porter’s latest book is Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots. She is currently working on a book on the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars. Gulliver Ralston is Artistic Director of the Brinkburn Festival and Director of Music at the University of Roehampton. Donald Rayfield is currently writing an expanded Russian version of Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia for BSG Press in Moscow. Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII is published by Chatto & Windus. Aaron Rosen is Lecturer in Sacred Traditions and the Arts at King’s, London. He is the author of Imagining Jewish Art (Legenda). Ian Sansom’s most recent books are Paper: An Elegy (2012) and The Norfolk Mystery (2012). Peter Scupham’s Collected Poems are published by Carcanet. Anne Sebba is working on a book about Paris from 1939 to 1949 as seen through women’s eyes. Miranda Seymour’s latest book is Noble Endeavours: The Life of Two Countries, England and Germany, in Many Stories (S&S). Charles Shaar Murray’s biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix are published by Canongate. Joan Smith’s latest book is The Public Woman. John Sweeney’s North Korea Undercover is this month published by Transworld Books. Michael Tanner is a philosopher at Cambridge University, and has been opera critic of The Spectator since 1996. Adrian Tinniswood’s latest book, The Rainborowes, was published by Jonathan Cape in September. Frances Wilson’s most recent publication is How to Survive the Titanic. She is currently writing a book about Thomas De Quincey. Philip Womack is working on his third book for children.

Literary Review | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 4

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content