Biography: Muhammad, the subject of Barnaby Rogerson's biography, is a figure of giant stature and abiding importance. He was, after all, the founder of one of the greatest empires of the world, creator of classical Arabic and of a worldwide religion that now has many millions of followers, write Mary Russell.
As such, Rogerson treats him with much reverence so that his book sometimes reads like a Lives of the Saints, with archaic words such as "verily" and "vouchsafed" scattered throughout the text.
However, once these linguistic obstacles are dealt with and Rogerson allows his subject to emerge as a man with needs and ambitions, this account of the Prophet's life is an important contribution to the history of Islam.
More importantly, the biographer, while portraying his subject as a kindly, humble man, does not shy away from those aspects of Islam's early history which some non-Muslims find difficult to handle: the murderous raids on other Arab tribes, the torture and vengeance meted out to religious opponents, the Prophet's habit of selecting wives from among the widows of men his followers had just attacked and killed.
Muhammad was born in 570 AD into a powerful tribe of Meccan merchants called the Quraysh.
At the age of 40, he had the first of many dreams or divine revelations from which came the Quran in which the ground rules of Islam are laid down. One of the main tenets of Islam is that there is only one God.
And while this belief presents no problem for Celts, able to conceive of a trinity of goddesses called Bridget until she was colonised by a Christian church and made one, it certainly caused great problems for the people of Mecca, at that time a sacred city with its own panoply of gods - rain and fertility being two gifts they were expected to bestow. Eventually, the Meccans saw their altars torn down and their gods burned by Muhammad's army, his soldiers inspired by a helpful verse from the Quran: "Fight them until persecution is no more and religion is all for God". Nor were these attacks always retaliatory. Some were pre-emptive such as the one against members of a Jewish tribe in the oasis city of Medina - which became Muhammad's adopted home - when they were forced to leave their homes and gardens following which the 700 men were beheaded and the women sent into slavery. Thus was the Beni Qurayzah tribe exterminated.
Muhammad was no mean warrior himself and often rode into battle wearing a shield and with a bow slung over his back and, like many a charismatic leader, liked to convey his so-called ordinariness with the phrase: "I go into women and I eat meat". But it was his account of the mystical Night Flight - in which he was transported to the very gates of paradise - which, Rogerson tells us, "would inspire generations of mystics, the Sufis . . . men like Ibn Arabi and Rumi Mevlani who would . . . explode the stuffy legalism that threatened to constrict Islam". And for that we should be grateful, for it is these poets who returned Islam to its divine origins and who remind us that there are roads to walk other than the fundamentalist ones.
Barnaby Rogerson's presentation of the varied faces of a man whose self-confessed weakness was women (he had 11 wives), who decorated his eyes with kohl and liked to wear yellow leather slippers and who yet could mesmerise his followers with accounts of the Divine, makes this book a must for anyone who wants to understand something of today's world.
Mary Russell is a writer
The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography. By Barnaby Rogerson, Little Brown, 240pp, £14.99
Mary Russell