b i o g r a p h y the model behaviour enjoined on believers in imitation of the Prophet, seen as the uswa, the ultimate exemplar. Whatever is ‘not sunna’ is reprehensible, if not proscribed. But occasionally, and to her credit, even Hazleton’s circumspection gets ruffled. On the ghastly massacre of the last Jewish tribe of Medina, when Muhammad ordered the beheading of hundreds of men in front of a purpose-dug ditch and the enslavement of their wives and children, all on trumpedup charges, Hazleton is justifiably appalled, as have been other commentators, Muslim as well as non-Muslim. In such episodes the tender, cat-loving Muhammad is not much in evidence. But when Hazleton struggles to analyse this shameful atrocity, she meanders into well-meaning piffle, seeing the event, bizarrely enough, as the original source of both ‘Muslim anti-Semitism and Jewish Islamophobia’, as though the two were equally well-founded.
For all her waffling, here and elsewhere, Hazleton does provide a good account of Muhammad’s life as it is given in standard Muslim sources; anyone who wants to know how Muslims regard their Prophet will find it both useful and entertaining. Her narrative moves at a pleasing clip. Unfortunately, however, she indulges in two highly irritating quirks. The first is what might be termed the intrusive anachronism. She seems to have a compulsion to interject contemporary references into her account. Thus, when Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s grandfather, finds himself obliged by an ill-considered vow to sacrifice his favourite son, only to be spared the ordeal by a cunning soothsayer, Hazleton remarks, ‘He had no need of a Freud to remind him of the deep connection between Eros and Thanatos, the life force and the death force, and moved instantly to mark his favourite son’s new lease on life by ensuring that it be passed on’ (in other words, he had him married). Sometimes these anachronisms are just plain weird. How is Alfred, Lord Tennyson, connected with the lex talionis (the ‘eye for an eye’ principle)? Had he written of nature, red in ‘tooth and eye’ rather than ‘tooth and claw’, this still would not have worked; Hazleton simply misunderstands his line. Other modern figures pop up, at utterly inopportune moments, from
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Georgia O’Keeffe to Václav Havel, and always to abrupt and ludicrous effect. The late Edward Said, reverently cited, is also much in evidence. Hazleton, apparently his disciple, indulges in sneers at ‘the enduring power of Orientalist condescension’, all the while blithely ignoring the fact that her very sources, as well as the secondary literature listed in her bibliography, were translated, edited or written by those same Orientalists so snidely maligned by Said.
Her second quirk, a striving after novelistic effects, is even more distracting. Of the orphaned Muhammad we read that there lurked ‘the shadow of loneliness in the corners of his eyes’. Only in the corners? Again, in attempting an explanation of the origins of Muhammad’s monotheism, Hazleton wades boldly into psychobabble, remarking that for ‘an adolescent trying to cement a life from the shards of loss and displacement, the monotheistic idea has to have been immensely powerful’. Hazleton’s breezy prose annoys, too: of an early poet she writes that ‘the rhymes he wrote went viral’ and of gossip around Mecca that ‘the desert grapevine buzzed’; and she speculates that Muhammad may have practised ‘breathing exercises’ (‘only now being rediscovered in the West’) when he meditated on his mountaintop. Sometimes Hazleton’s frothy embroideries wreak havoc on Arabic grammar, on which she clearly has a shaky hold: pilgrims to Mecca, in Muhammad’s time as now, do not exclaim ‘Allah umma’ (‘O God of the Umma’, meaning the universal Muslim community), which is an incorrect locution in any case, but rather, ‘Allahumma’, an archaic vocative form meaning simply ‘O God’.
There seem to be two authorial voices at work in this unexpectedly diverting book. One voice is wary, careful to recapitulate the classical narrative without giving offence, a paragon of circumspection; the other is a bit madcap, perhaps chafing under the yoke of caution, prone to fanciful extrapolations and generous lashings of schmaltz. If I call Lesley Hazleton’s book diverting, that’s only because I’ve never before had the pleasure of chuckling my way through a biography of the Prophet, or indeed of any prophet. Sometimes circumspection comes at too high a price. To order this book for £16, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 10
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