Customer Reviews

The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, No. 11)

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J. Horovitz wrote this classic monograph a century ago in two parts in German . . . and then the translator and editor Pickthall botched it. The Darwin Press has come back to this work, edited it properly, and added a hundred years' worth of footnotes to it. With the footnotes and corrections and the preface, this is now a book in its own right.

You will learn a LOT about the doings of the first biographers of the Prophet in this book. When you read this or that hadith going back to (say) `Urwa, you will see said hadith as (here) a post-Zubayrid work with a Hijazi bias. (The book assumes that this paragraph means something to you; if it doesn't, you should pick up Hawting's history first.)

The book is dated, yes, but there are footnotes to point you to more modern works in the field, as well as to some texts to which Horovitz did not have access.

Horovitz's essay is not only a classic of scholarship in its own right, but the Darwin Press reissue is an artifact representing how scholarship has changed over the last century. As such I recommend this book mainly to those readers of Ibn Warraq's compilations as are serious about learning the trajectory of Orientalism.